Is Teams connector retirement a tweak to fit EU laws, or a sign of price rises to come?

Arguments over the retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams shows no sign of abating, with some users pointing to the EU-forced unbundling of the product, while analysts are wondering if this a sign of a new, pricier, era for the application. Microsoft dropped the bombshell on users at the beginning of July, with the …

[A Non e-mouse]

My thought is that it's due to a security issue with the connectors.

[druck]

It's pure a revenue move, it's always a revenue move.

[Pete Sdev]

That's part of the BS that MS is using as a justification but it's not true. The webhook URL contained a long non-guessable uid, and could trivially be changed if leaked.

[Doctor Syntax]

"Independent of what Microsoft is required to do by European regulators in the Teams case, there are still some likely pricing and licensing patterns customers should expect based on history"

Translation: This is what we do, being able to blame it on EU regulation is a nice bonus.

[xyz]

Yes and yes...

You can tell Power Automate Workflow will be a dog, just look at the initials.

[ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo]

Re: Yes and yes...

Is the Power Automate Workflow Team known as the PAW Patrol?

[TrevorH]

The current connectors use a domain per customer like $company.webhook.office.com and then go on to add another 3 UUID's to the hook url plus another random string that looks suspiciously like another uuid with the '-' characters removed. Total length minus the identifiable company + webhook.office.com is around 170 bytes so it's not what I'd call easily guessable. So first step for anyone wanting to exploit a security vulnerability in a webhook is to guess the 170 character random string so they can post to it. Sure, that's security by obscurity but you need to know the correct url to be able to get to it.

[Paul Crawford]

TL;DR - before you were expecting to be reamed, now Microsoft are charging for the lube as well.

[Pete Sdev]

Frack you MS

We use, unfortunately, Teams at work - mostly down to the lemmings effect than choice.

I have several scripts,an in-house web-app, and a gitlab instance that posts notifications to various channels in Teams.

The suggested new way doesn't work due to various issues, including cost and time.

Problems with this typical MS move are:

* The new way costs money as a Power decimate subscription is needed - no free tier, only a 30 day trial (by combat).

* The very short time to EOL particularly as it's during the summer when at most firms there's less staff (particularly in Europe)

* The new way isn't feature compatible with the old - no posting to private channels for example (deal breaker)

* The new way is far more labour intensive, and the workload UI is terrible

The comments to the announcement at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/retirement-of-office-365-connectors-within-microsoft-teams/ are gold. As are thr reviews of the Workflow Teams-app.

[klh]

Re: Frack you MS

Did they really replace generic webhooks with a web based no-code thingy? My expectations were already low, M$ somehow still found a way to make it worse.

[TrevorH]

Interesting, the SPAM that was being appended to each webhook post saying "Action required, we're screwing you over" has now gone away. As of about 05:00 BST this morning, that SPAM stopped.

[TrevorH]

They blinked:

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...