Retirement of Office 365 connectors within Microsoft Teams

[Dachande663]

Teams is already chaotic for development. The documentation mixes between multiple deprecated versions already. This is just going to add to the chaos. It feels like there is no-one at Microsoft responsible for "Teams" as a product. Instead it's the bastard orphan that gets bits given and taken away as each department takes a swing at it. At this point, I would genuinely say it's the current most hated Microsoft product in daily use. And for good reason.

[D13Fd]

Agreed. At least in my office, certain features (videoconferencing/meetings/calendar) get tons of use every day. Microsoft made this product that was a commercial success by any measure but cannot seem to execute well on it.

That said, it depends on what you compare it to. Microsoft Word is also a longstanding success, and the development velocity on it is glacial. There are bugs in Microsoft Word that have sat unfixed for years and years -- Teams has changed pretty rapidly by comparison. I think the difference is that Teams is newer and feels more like a product Microsoft should be actively developing.

[opjjf]

Love the comments under the post :) For me it means no more notifications in Teams, as our organisation policy blocks all the useful workflow features.

[heisgone]

I miss the good old time when software was shipped in a box and developers couldn't simply remove features with a commit.

[elzbardico]

It was only in a slower pace. Sure, you could keep using an older version, but then people would start sharing files in the new version with you, and after a few times having to ask people to "save it on Word 95 format" you would bit the bullet and upgrade to such abominations like the "Office Ribbon".

[hypeatei]

I really don't know how you can enshitify and mess up a chat application so badly. The web version of Teams fails to even load in Firefox for unexplainable reasons.

The desktop app isn't much better either - it's slow, buggy, and the text editor absolutely blows if you're trying to do more than write a sentence or two.

[_lateralus_]

they're pissing on us without even the courtesy of calling it rain

[nhance]

Well there's definitely a lot more functionality in Power Automate:

https://www.connectorreview.com/

[trallnag]

But there are also things it can't do. For example connectors support posting messages to private channels. Power Automate only supports this if the message is posted on behalf of the workflow creator. Basically the persons name will always show up in the posted message. Not great for alerts and similar

[valleyjo]

Is the an EU regulation response thing? The article doesn’t mention that but I’m not very familiar with this offering so I wasn’t sure.

[greatgib]

I guess that you will be forced to "pay per use" with power automate...

[tomrod]

This angers me a bit. I use O365 connectors all the time. They've been very useful.

What is workflows? Why is that REPLACING these instead of just, you know, being available as a totally separate product that I don't want to migrate to? Why can't I have the software grandfathered in?

I hate obvious resume-driven development and products.

[elzbardico]

Never, ever invest in any shine new microsoft technology too heavily.

Microsoft launches new products based on basically one or both of two overarching themes:

1) This is a product that we can sell business that promises to commodify or eliminate the need for software developers completely (microsoft as a company hates software development as a well paid profession and truly believe that they should be the only organization writing software in the entire world)

2) This is a product that ties our customers into one of of our cash cows.

And this is all. There's no coeherent strategy beyond that.

[organsnyder]

I can understand retiring products that duplicate functionality elsewhere—keeping systems operating, even in maintenance mode, isn't free—but the short timeframe is ridiculous.