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Microsoft component retirement frenzy geared to product simplification: Analyst
A rash of planned feature and application retirements within the Microsoft 365 environment is the result of Microsoft wanting to centralize, modernize, operationalize customer spend, and ultimately economize by simplifying product offerings where it can, an industry analyst said Monday.
Jeremy Roberts, senior workshop director at Info-Tech Research Group, said the fact that a number of Microsoft 365 (M365) services have been or will soon be mothballed does not come as a surprise, as Microsoft has been making quite a few changes to the product. He described those changes as “the nature of SaaS [software-as-a-service]. You get with it, or you get left behind.”
The retirements will precede the end of support for Windows 10, which happens on October 14 of this year, and is a move that Roberts said has resulted in Microsoft facing “quite a bit of resistance.”
“I think the AI thing [in Windows 11] plays better with investors than with enterprise consumers, and features like Recall that have been hyped are maybe more exciting to Microsoft internal folks than to real people,” he said.
He added that he also thinks that “an aggressive effort to get people to upgrade PCs probably has left a bitter taste in some folks’ mouths. That said, for the enterprise, most in my circle have already made the transition. I don’t talk about it much anymore. Besides, if you care that much, you can get extended [Windows 10] support for three more years.”
“Many enterprise organizations are now prepping for the Windows 10 end-of-service (EOS) in October of 2025,” observed Andrew Hewitt, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “As usual, we expect many organizations will not be able to move to Windows 11 by that due date, and they will have to take advantage of Microsoft’s long term support.”
However, he said, “The interesting part of this EOS event, though, is the arrival of the AI PC. While these devices hit shelves in 2024, we expect 2025 to be the year in which more organizations actually adopt them. The Windows 10 EOS provides a great opportunity for organizations to make a clean cut over to Windows 11 while investing in new AI-enabled hardware..”
On the Microsoft 365 front, a blog from Microsoft partner AdminDroid, sourced from the Microsoft software lifecycle reporting site, outlines the following scheduled feature “retirements.” These include:
- Retirement of Tag Feature in Microsoft 365 Apps: Microsoft retired the “Tags” feature in Microsoft 365 apps between Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 10, 2025. Users can no longer view or apply tags.
- Office 365 Connectors Retirement from Microsoft Teams: Owners of webhook-based Office 365 connectors in Teams must update their URLs to a new structure by January 31, 2025 to avoid service disruptions; all webhook-based connectors must be updated to continue posting messages in Teams. Microsoft recommends migrating webhooks to the Teams Workflow app.
- The O365 Connectors service will be retired at the end of 2025.
- Microsoft Viva Engage: Retirement of Private Unlisted Groups in External Networks as of Monday, Jan. 13. “After this date, users will no longer be able to create, export, access, or participate in unlisted groups within external networks,” the blog noted.
- As of Tuesday, Jan. 14, The PowerPoint QuickStarter Feature will be completely retired.
- Alert notifications feature in Microsoft Defender for Identity will be retired this week.
- Viva topics, the blog said, will be “discontinued on Feb. 22 and Microsoft will no longer pursue new feature enhancements for the platform.
- Microsoft officially deprecated the Azure AD and MSOnline PowerShell modules in March 2024. However, they will remain functional until March 30, 2025, with support limited to critical security fixes.
- Starting in late January 2025, any OneDrive accounts left unlicensed for more than 90 days will be automatically archived, hitting customers with extra costs to regain access in Microsoft Archive. They will be charged $0.05 per GB per month to store unlicensed OneDrive content and $0.60 per GB to reactivate the account in the Microsoft 365 archive. Microsoft recommends either deleting these accounts or assigning them a license.
- Starting next month, the blog said, “Microsoft will remove the ‘Monitor’ action in the Safe Attachments policy. Any existing policies set to ‘Monitor’ will be automatically changed to ‘Block.’ The recipients, status, or priority configured in the policy will remain unchanged.”
These moves followed the deprecation of the legacy Teams client in March 2024 (with its end of availability scheduled for July 1, 2025), which Roberts said “had more to do with efficiency than with aesthetics. They’ve moved off of Electron and AngularJS [development platforms] to WebView2 and React. This is meant to improve performance, responsiveness, and optimization. Basically, this is Microsoft cleaning up its technical debt.”
That is, he said, “one of the benefits of a SaaS environment, and while it might be a bit of a pain for users to make the transition, the old and new Teams are similar enough that the change management exercise shouldn’t be overwhelming. They have to cut over at some point; otherwise, they’re left maintaining a fractured environment, which is ultimately not really beneficial to anyone in the long term.”
The worst is over with the Teams migration, said William McKeon-White, senior analyst, infrastructure and operations at Forrester Research. “I still find New Teams to be a little less stable than Classic teams, but the weird bugs that plagued the first release have been remediated. There of course will be some confusion (especially as users have to re-pin the app to the desktop; I anticipate a week or so of tickets around ‘Teams disappeared what happened’) but the migration will be less annoying that the deprecation of Office 365 Connectors.”
The loss of those connectors, he noted, will be “be significantly more disruptive. It will be annoying for administrators and power users, breaking automation until the migration is complete.“
“How onerous this is, will depend on the organization,” he added. “It could be the effort of less than a day, or stretch into weeks for orgs with dozens of connections. While official guidance does helpfully detail the ways to save time through using templates, this transition will require effort. Because of the way some orgs use a complex web of connectors, apps and extensions, something is going to break. … To avoid this, it is advisable for admins to go through their extensions now to evaluate what’s being used in mission critical work.”
The march to the cloud, said Roberts, “continues with the end of support for M365 Apps support on Windows Server 2016/2019 and the end of support for the legacy Office 2016 and 2019 products [which takes effect in October of this year]. I don’t think anyone is surprised that they would make this choice. Microsoft loves recurring revenue. I imagine most corporate clients are already M365 customers, but for those who are holding out, this could complicate things from a security and feature perspective.”
Another strategy Microsoft is pursuing, he said, “involves pushing people towards Graph. I see this as an attempt to standardize on a central environment. Instead of multiple standards and pathways into the ecosystem, a bit of upfront learning in the form of new cmdlets and some familiarity with the Graph architecture could introduce efficiencies at the cost of some upfront learning for administrators.”
Roberts noted that not all of these changes will please IT. “Sysadmins will be grumpy about this because it is more work in the short term,” he said. “Many of the benefits will only be clear after a few years, more than likely.”
This story has been updated with comments from Forrester analysts.
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AI will reinvent the state, and the British Government has a plan to make it happen
Nobody could accuse the British Government of lacking enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI). According to its newly published AI Opportunities Action Plan, the technology’s blossoming will remake the British economy, boost productivity, smooth bureaucracy, and transform the quality of state services such as healthcare.
Through this, the government wants the UK to become an AI superpower, consolidating its position as the world’s third largest AI market, behind the US and China, the report said.
Part of the initiative is a £14 billion investment ($18 billion) by Vantage Data Centres, Nscale, and Kyndryl to build new data center infrastructure, on top of the £25 billion in AI investment announced at the International Investment Summit last October.
Its deeper theme is that the UK should be able to produce as well as consume AI technology, because receiving technology from others is a recipe for dependence.
“There is barely an aspect of our society that will remain untouched by this force of change,” said Prime Minister Keir Starmer in his report foreword.
“This government will not sit back passively and wait for change to come. It is our responsibility to harness it and make it work for working people,” he said.
AI Growth Zones (AIGZs)Many of the 13,250 jobs the reports says will be created in the near term will be in “AI growth zones”, the first of which will be in Culham, Oxfordshire, also the HQ for the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
That’s significant because all of the data centers housing AI will consume huge amounts of power, at least 100MW to start with and eventually 500MW. Unfortunately, while Culham is the home of research into nuclear energy, there is no power station onsite, which explains why the report proposes a new AI Energy Council to fill the gap.
Cooling the new data centers could also be an issue in a potential drought zone, despite Thames Water promising to build a new reservoir nearby.
Additional requirementsNational Data Library: AI, of course, needs data – lots of it. That’s becoming harder to source. The Report’s answer is a National Data Library, “underpinned by strong privacy-preserving safeguards.” The deeper detail of this has yet to be announced, but issues of privacy and copyright lurk.
Public compute: The UK needs another supercomputer, somewhere. This is despite the new government ditching plans as recently as October to build precisely this type of computer at Edinburgh University. The UK’s other supercomputer centers include Bristol (Isambard AI), and Cambridge (Dawn).
People: The plan proposed working out how many people the UK needs and then developing plans to fill gaps. That includes importing skills by exploring “how the existing immigration system can be used to attract graduates from universities producing some of the world’s top AI talent.”
Regulatory oversight: AI has yet to grapple with its daunting ethical concerns. The report’s answer is to turn the UK’s AI Safety Institute (AISI) into a statutory body with the power to intervene where it thinks fit.
White hotThe idea of a bold national plan for AI echoes that of another Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who in a famous 1963 speech proposed overhauling the UK through the “white heat of technology”.
This parallel isn’t necessarily happy; although the UK embraced Wilson’s white heat in pockets, it failed to capitalize on the wider opportunities offered by that era’s early development of computing and software. That was despite having plenty of clever people in the field, a decent education system, and big companies willing to invest.
The new plan is also uncomfortably similar to the recent Conservative administration’s championing of everything AI under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, right down to his rhetoric about matching AI superpowers the US and China.
One difference is that the report’s vision was authored by industry figure Matt Clifford, an entrepreneur and investor appointed as the administration’s AI adviser after Labour’s election win in July.
He authored the plan’s 50 recommendations, all of which the government plans to implement. That suggests that the UK’s AI overhaul is not being driven as a pet project by politicians alone. Another backer is Demis Hassabis, co-winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his AI-aided work on protein folding.
Making not takingIn many ways, the challenges faced by the UK in enabling AI – indeed, all future computing projects – mirror what every country faces. Energy and cooling are problems, and tooling up to fill infrastructure and skills gaps is competitive and resource intensive.
One reason Wilson’s 1960’s plan struggled was that the state and public services ignored the computing innovation going on around them. However, given that AI is already being experimented with in the NHS, perhaps attitudes have changed.
But what will really count is that private companies can make money out of AI in the UK in the long run. Governments plans and infrastructure are helpful and set the mood, but only go so far.
“While the focus on investing in infrastructure such as computing power and a national data library is welcome,” said Dr Pia Huesch, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) research fellow, “the UK Government must not forget the risks posed by AI technologies or the international partnerships that are needed to secure long-term benefit from AI technologies.”
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