Users rage as Microsoft announces retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams Microsoft has thrown some enterprises into a spin after confirming that, with only a few months' notice, Office 365 connectors within Teams will be cut. The connectors and webhooks are used to plumb workflows into a Teams channel. For example, users might use them to post an update into a chat stream. This means you can read …
This post has been deleted by its author
"clicked through without understanding the risk then you must bear some of the fault if you're left in the crap."
Perhaps there will come a time when companies realize that the workflows they've built on other company's systems are subject to being discontinued at any time. At minimum, they need to have a fall back should they need to have a workaround. This is also where the old fashioned way of having boxed software that ran on in-house iron had some serious advantages.
Another issue is people build a workflow on these pieces of software without having first outlined what they need it to do. Oh look, it can do "this" and off they go. Before very long there is an amorphous blob with no documentation. No "3-ring binders" on a shelf that can be referenced when there is a big re-org and some departments are made redundant. The data that was part of those departments may still be very necessary, but with nobody left, getting at that data is going to be a massive slog.
Everything is fine. Until it isn't.
This, Azure functions, Google workflows etc... make it very quick to deliver some functionality. Messy, flaky, undocumented, but quick. That's why in house devs keep using it. They can provide a quick and dirty solution to someone's problem. By the time it inevitably fails, the devs will probably have moved on long ago, leaving others to pick up the pieces.
Doing something really nice, with vendor agnostic technologies that don't lock you into one of the big vendor proprietary stacks, is harder. It has ever been thus and IT developments tend to follow the path of least resistance. There are of course durable, reliable, supportable, portable workflow solutions out there, but none of them were delivered by an in house IT team.
Best to treat them as fast prototypes/demonstrators. Set up sonething quick and very dirty with only about 60% of functionality needed. "This is very rough and ready but is it the sort of thing you were looking for? We could put something together properly in about $ESTIMATE".
Manager: "That's great! Put it into production as it is, I don't want to spend any more time and money on it, and as far as I can see it'll do as is"
Dev: "Did you hear what I said about it being rought and ready?"
Manager: "Do it, or I'll mark down your appraisal. You do want to continue working here, don't you?"
Dev: ...
THIS.
The only way I can think of to stop this syndrome is to make it visually-ugly, and functionally-stupid. No pretty GUIs. Pop up a full-screen console window, complete with fixed-width, 5x7 dot-matix font, make users type in full network path names, text menus of the "1. Blah / 2. Blew / 3. Blow / Enter the number of your choice?"-style, etc.
And, when asked by management if you could "Just pretty it up a bit", you must respond with an unreasonably-long time estimate, followed with, "It would be much-more cost-effective to design and code this properly."
Even that all might not be enough to sway a "right now" / "It'll only be temporary"-obssessive manager.
The only way I can think of to stop this syndrome is to make it visually-ugly, and functionally-stupid. No pretty GUIs. Pop up a full-screen console window, complete with fixed-width, 5x7 dot-matix font, make users type in full network path names, text menus of the "1. Blah / 2. Blew / 3. Blow / Enter the number of your choice?"-style, etc.
As long as Microsoft says that's how it's going to be they will merely nod sagely and OK even that.
Remember, it partly depends on a cult-like suspension of reason to sell. For other examples, see Tesla, Cybertruck.
Even that all might not be enough to sway a "right now" / "It'll only be temporary"-obssessive manager.
That type of manager will force the change through and call it a, "tactical solution", and it will subsequently exist in Production until the heat death of the universe.
So, you think that will stop it from becoming a "critical business system"? One operating company in my employer has a Finance system for almost 20 years that was just this!
It took merging them into another operating company to finally get them to something vaguely modern. They did it kicking and screaming!
You mean the way so many applications (Apps) are going in the drive to harmonise everything so it can be used on a touch interface the size of a phone.
Usability has long gone and nobody gives a stuff if the interface is crap as long as it looks funky.
The only way I can think of to stop this syndrome is to make it visually-ugly, and functionally-stupid. No pretty GUIs. Pop up a full-screen console window, complete with fixed-width, 5x7 dot-matix font,
What companies such as M$ have done is put the pretty UI on top of the rough and ready underlayment and listed it as a finished product. If they make one or two thing more convenient, that will sell it to the managers who will force it on the rank and file. I expect that if whatever it is will barf up a report with full color graphs in Powerpoint format, it's going to sell a treat. Never mind that something more competent can be lashed up in Libre office.
Odd, isn't it, that IT-type products are treated differently from every other bit of kit that companies buy, lease or develop. Imagine if the boss ordered their new company car and got two planks with pram wheels, half a bucket for a seat and string for steering.
What are the alternatives?
Big business wants contracts, SLAs, commercial support. They pretty much don't care what they pay (see the other article today on Oracle & Birmingham).
Given the cry will be "Linux", "Open Source" that pretty much leaves RHEL or Oracle however neither have the cloud services for Office or collaboration (in the loosest sense given what Teams is like) that Microsoft have.
What are the commercial alternatives to Teams?
What about the other integrations?
Are they actually any better in terms of their support and what is to stop a feature being pulled at short notice?
The T&Cs relating to any software or cloud service pretty much allows the vendor to do anything at any time with no guarantee that the product will actually work as designed. That has been software from day 1.
I don't like the way MS operates but they are not alone, That is just how big tech is and it is accepted by the majority of customers. The actual users just have to put up with it. There is a distinction between customer and user.
You're right, but the reason that there are no real competitors for competing commercial products that can be signed up for with negotiated terms, SLA, etc. is partly because MS give stuff away free and partly because businesses happily use free stuff without thinking through the consequences. A bit like the people in my town who loudly lament the loss of the high-street grocers, bakers and butchers. That'll be the same people who do all their grocery shopping online or at the out-of-town supermarket because it's free to park there. Now the local supermarket has shut its in-house bakery and butcher's counter and no doubt the fish counter will be next.
that are tied up in knots like this by Microsoft?
TBH, I saw the writing on the wall when they made Server 2012 harder to manage than the previous version unless you had sold your soul to MS. A buggy patch that took out our whole MSCS config was the last straw for me. Since then, while I do work with MS stuff, I always make sure that my customers have an alternative ready to go. Just not letting them totally control your PC and your business workflow is a must and that alternative is NOT GOOGLE anything.
What MS giveth, MS can easily Taketh away.
What Google giveth, Google can easily taketh away ( and often do)
Now MS is following the Google model. Madness.
Problem is that the same thing is happening with Open Source. Big Corp buys little open source project. Introduces a paid version, then slowly deprecates the open source version.
Yes, Qlik - you have effed up Talend.
Plus Jasper Server is no longer available. It's a world of pain in BI.
> What MS giveth, MS can easily Taketh away.
Todays example: Microsoft killed my online life after I called Gaza
Given also Amazon’s long history of locking user accounts for no reason, it’s beginning to look like a full migration away from US corporations is going to be necessary, rather than just a move from Microsoft to open source.
“…ensure that your integrations are built on an architecture that can grow with your business needs and provide maximum security of your information”
Firstly, and most obviously, any reference by MS to anything related to security is, of course, a joke. And an increasingly tiring one at that.
As for the rest, well… it seems like businesses that use this feature were doing so because (presumably) it already “met their business needs” and they didn’t need MS to fuck then over.
Really, everything (I mean EVERYTHING) MS touches is an utter shower of shite. Why anyone still uses their shite is a mystery to me. Why anyone invests even more time and money and effort making such shite even more engrained into their business than it already is is a question I cannot begin to fathom - it makes my head explode in the same way thinking about the infinity of the universe does. Only with more shite.
A young Steve Jobs famously said "They have absolutely no taste, and I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products,"
He also gave a lot of back-handed compliments to Microsoft and Gates. "Microsoft made a lot of applications for Macintosh and they were terrible," he said, before complimenting "but they kept at it and got better and eventually dominated the Macintosh application market."
Jobs' back-handed compliments didn't stop as he said that Microsoft are great opportunists but "I don't mean it in a bad way" he continued. "They are like Japanese and they just keep on coming," he said.
Jobs also said that he had no problem with Microsoft's success and that they "earned their success, for the most part," but what he had a problem was that Microsoft made "really third-rate products."
He didn't stop and continued lambasting Microsoft. "Their products have no spirit in them, their products are pedestrian." He said that what's said is that most customers also didn't have that spirit.
Jobs was then asked whether he was sad that Microsoft had "won" and Apple lost. He said, "what saddens me isn't that Microsoft had won but that their products lacked insight and creativity."
Not directly MS related, but I've commented on here and other sites about this whole thing with the arbitrary pricing policy these companies impose and can't understand how they arrive at the pricing they do. How do MS justify £12.50 a month per user when the back-end infrastructure to support it is already in place and working? Surely, with the scale MS are working at here, they could provide this for pennies per user, so this looks like pure price gouging. Sadly, though, this is going to get even harder to avoid in the future.
The price of a product isn't just based on the direct costs. The price will be a combination of what the market will bear together with other costs (e.g. R&D, marketing, etc.) that have to be paid for by sales. A better question to ask is how much your business values the service it gets from a product compared with its price and whether or not it would be cheaper (including future risks of the product disappearing) to specify, develop, support and maintain your own.
> As intrusive, constantly resizing bloody adverts make it impossible.
I don’t see these ad’s - using an un modified iPad to access ElReg, although the Windows box does run adblocking.
I wonder whether the ad load is related to where you located and device etc. being used.
I said something similar on another thread. You cannot rely on software when vendor behaviour declines. Use the simple off-the-shelf stuff, but don't bet your functionality on your software vendor behaving decently. You would avoid a doctor who has been struck off. You wouldn't hire a mob lawyer. If you consider your software vendor to be unreliable, change the software you use and the way you use it. Given that the industry is not renowned for benign behaviour towards users, consider using the least software for the maximum benefit, and fill in manually.
I send paper invoices. Rarely, one gets lost. A couple of my customers switched to digital only and I complied for them. They now have the highest rate of lost invoices. They shouldn't of course, but they do. Tech is only beneficial when it works, reliably, and doesn't get hacked. If you rely on complex packages, your vendor has you over a barrel. That's how a fixed fee contract to produce software in 2 years can turn into a decade-long soap opera costing five times as much. Treat software like a prescription drug. A small amount will be useful. Getting addicted to it, will screw you over. Audit how you function and find ways to use less software and simpler software. You will make your company more resilient and reduce your costs. Reducing your costs increases your profit even when the wider economy is dying from the failure and ideological insanity of politicians.
"You cannot rely on CLOUD-BASED software when vendor behaviour declines."
FTFY. If you "buy" s/w on perpetual license (getting more and more difficult these days), at least you are working with a static target and can upgrade to a newer version when it's convenient and you've had time to prepare. Basing your business around a constantly shifting target like cloud-based offerings where the target may shift frequently in unanticipated ways at little to no notice is just asking for trouble.
Years ago we would just code our way around problems, a util here, a script there but somewhere it feels like they simply want to sell us more static products and the true spirit that drove me for years working in IT since 1988 has slowly been killed by shit like this from MS.
Last couple of years my need to code has been curtailed by companies simply just plumping for shit products that barely work, if you don't like it then raise an ER with the vendor and it will be ignored. "No, we're not putting that really useful thing you see in the GUI, into the API so you can make use of it!!"
So sick and tired of IT turning into a mindless quagmire of brainless, expensive shit. Just 5-6 years to go until retirement....
Quite. This is exactly why bash (and the shells before it) were created. Extract data as text, manipulate it, and inject the transformation into the next component.
Still, if you outsource these tasks to third parties then good luck.
Mistake number one is always choosing MS Windows. Well done.
You are using the shittiest 'death to productivity' software out there because it's 'free'. They just made your shit a little shittier so they could sell you some more shit (PowerAutomate). Don't complain when you keep a rabid weasel in your bedroom and it bites you.
Getting more and more annoyed with Cloud bollocks and companies bate and switch. Pulling people into services they like they deciding to can them. At least when you bought the software on CD/DVD you could use it years after its out of support.
Problem is businesses just accept it and we're told to fix it but clueless management.
Thirty some years ago when where I worked decided to switch from Novell Netware and WordPerfect I told the IT people they were nuts to go whole hog into mictosoft. After a few updates and thousands of BSDs some of the IT staff began to agree with me but by then we were fully grafted into the mictosoft creature from the black lagoon. Especially when it seemed the programmers had to relearn how to use mictosoft languages after every upgrade. And now mictosoft is at it again, going for the backpockets instead of providing secure, stable software.
I've now been on 3 contracting gigs in the last 2 years that all had the suits mandate "shut down Slack, move to Teams".
I'm chortling like Scooby Doo or Muttley.
As for Power Automate: the Silverlight of Microsoft automation. Used it once or twice, went back to webhooks in Teams (as it was also much easier to build notification that would easily send to Slack *or* Teams).
When we people learn to GTFO out Microsoft's trash? They played nice while they were a moribund, forgotten company. Now they're roaring back as bigger assholes than ever. Windows is an offensive, incompetent shitshow... as is Office.
There are open-source or small-source alternatives that are far better than Microsoft's clumsy junk. GET OUT NOW.
Aren't I so glad that I didn't go to the effort of learning these new features, only to see them gutted moments later?
PowerAutomate is an interesting tool in of itself; though I have noticed that some pages/tools don't stay live unless an owner is festidious about periodically testing them. That might be a company-specific thing.
Sharepoint and OneDrive have grown to become the new targets of my MS Hatred above anything else; probably because they both encourage disorganisation; and, in the case of large files (you know, those 100mb spreadsheets you can't avoid) end up having to work on local drives anyway.
On all my kit, all our pc based accounts are configured to keep local copies - had it before where you couldn't access the data in the cloud
Phones are a little different due to the sheer number of photos that some people take
Even have a remote nas that brings local copies down (and an rsync to bring onto MY server)
Bit worried that ms thinks that anything maybe ok for them to use for their AI, so going to look at owncloud instead
>” On all my kit, all our pc based accounts are configured to keep local copies - had it before where you couldn't access the data in the cloud”
Looks like I need to revisit the 365 configuration a client is using, as the users “on this pc” documents folder is mapped to OneDrive, so regularly open a local document only to be usable to save because it can’t get a cloud connection (plus regularly getting untrusted connection, because the certificate for some random service that underpins OneDrive/Sharepoint has expired (random because the certificate details bear no information that permits me to connect them to either a specific MS service or my tenancy….
So currently the only way to ensure a file really is local is the save it to Public Documents or a separate non OneDrive linked USB drive.
Teams - Slack - Discord - ICQ and countless others are clunky distractions, because they demand constant monitoring.
It’s far more effective to just talk to the person face-to-face, or call them if they’re not nearby, or send a text/photo if they’re not available, or send an email if they don’t have the cellular, or leave a note, or send a letter.
(I don’t approve of these gimmicky “fad apps,” they come and go, they’re unnecessarily complicated, they’re inherently insecure, and they are nothing but glorified Usenet / RSS aggregators.)
Alright grandad, let's get you back to the home there!
Seriously, they're just tools and you need to find the "STFU" option that's always hidden. I mute most of the channels in MSTeams where i work and only keep my own team's Teams channel on notifcation. Same with emails, I have rules for everything and the only emails I get instantly alerted on are ones from my manager, my co-worker or the P1 incident mailist, everyone else can f**k right off and get in the queue for my attention!
Not really, though, in this case, I think.
Having retired some years ago and not having to deal directly with anything Microsoft (apart from my better half's Win11 laptop), I cannot comment on any of the above lamentations.
But, to me it looks more as if it could be security related, that Microsoft would desperately not want to be known; hence the disparity between the message and the spam (which MS hopes will subliminally prod people to comply post-haste. before the whole house of cards come tumbling down?).
Have Microsoft ousted the Russkies and/or the Chinese from Azure yet? I have not seen any reports that everything is dandy again in the Azure web 'o sphere, but I may have missed it - I do not follow the news fervently any more. To me it looks as if they (or maybe other bad actors) are still running rampant within Azure, doing whatever they want with impunity (see https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/infosec_in_brief/ (Microsoft tells yet more customers their emails have been stolen), for instance).
Could MS have discovered that all those links and hooks can be easily abused to infiltrate other Azure instances, for example (I have no idea, I am just speculating)? That would surely explain their seeming hesitancy in calling it by its name, as, should it be true that MS have for all intents and purposes lost control over Azure, it would basically mean a world of pain for MS and would hasten their demise.
In any case, MS will have to come clean about what is really going on here (and with more urge than their normal lackadaisical way of being quite reluctant to address embarrassing issues).
Interesting times...
I think this is a case of left arm (companies and users) blaming someone else because their right arm - (elected and appointed representatives) is / are doing EXACTLY what they have been elected, appointed and asked to do.
Almost everyone seems to blame Microsoft for the short deadline but i think MS pretty much has no way out of this - there is an antitrust case in the European Union which was actually brought by the EU companies & users own elected representatives - oh..the shock and awe that elected officials are actually doing their job...
And if the EU antitrust regulators are on the case that means that Uncle Sam's antitrust regulators are probably also smelling blood in the water and are doing circles around the MS boat...
.. and now users are complaining that MS is doing exactly what was requested of them under penalty of massive fines if they do not comply? oh... the irony ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I presume “all clouds” includes home and personal 365 subscriptions (and others like education and Government clouds).
Whilst I get the focus of this report on the enterprise, it does look like MS are going to really upset their wider user base, who will have just used the provided connectors and webhooks, which given Power Automate is not included as part of Office 365 personal or family. It’s only included as part of Office 365 Business Basic and above, they are going to see things breaking…
.
"Do Microsoft not learn from insufficient transition deadlines? "
Folks need to stop confusing user and purchaser. MS problems are not your problems and haven't been for decades. They sell software your boss makes you use because there's no alternative. (Mac and Linux are inconsequential aberrations)
The new copilot will ocr your whole screen and put it in a text file... Just use that.
Once the revenue stream for Power Automate has been maximised (it will go thought various guises of increasing cost versions before that) it too will be discontinued and replaced by the promises of better more secure product. This will not be determined by functionality for the customer but by M$ product lifecycle financial planning. Monopoly Practises 101 - the beast always gets more and more hungry for your money.
Update 07/23/2024: We understand and appreciate the feedback that customers have shared with us regarding the timeline provided for the migration from Office 365 connectors. We have extended the retirement timeline through December 2025 to provide ample time to migrate to another solution such as blah blah blah
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
