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Classic SharePoint Blogs Approaching 'Retirement'

A recent Microsoft Message Center post indicates that so-called "classic" blogs used by SharePoint Online subscribers are on their way toward "retirement."

Microsoft will start making it harder (but not impossible) to continue to use the classic SharePoint blogs starting in January. It wants organizations to shift to using so-called "modern" SharePoint Communication Sites instead. Modern sites use the more lightweight and open source SharePoint Framework tools to create intranet pages.

Here are Microsoft's milestones to note for classic SharePoint Online blog users:

  • Beginning January 18th, 2020, the classic blog site template name will change to "Blogs (retired)."
  • Beginning July 17th, 2020, the ability to create new classic blog sites through the user interface will be turned off.

The Message Center is typically just seen by IT pros managing Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft's note concerning classic SharePoint blogs was seen by Vlad Catrinescu, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and SharePoint expert, who highlighted the changes in this blog post.

Catrinescu noted that it'll still be possible to create new classic SharePoint blogs after Microsoft's July 17 end date if organizations know how to do it using PowerShell. Moreover, Microsoft didn't say that the classic SharePoint blogs will get deleted.

That's a switch from Microsoft's rather sharp plans to put an end to Delve blogs. Delve blogs really will get deleted by Microsoft in 2020, as noted last month.

In a second blog post, Catrinescu noted that Microsoft has quietly extended the end dates of Delve blogs by a few months. Here are the revised milestones for Delve blogs, as modified by a Dec. 4 Microsoft Message Center post:

  • Beginning January 18th, 2020, tenants will not have the ability to create new Delve blogs.
  • Beginning February 18th, 2020, the ability to create new, or edit existing posts, in existing Delve blogs will be disabled.
  • Beginning July 17th, 2020, existing Delve blogs will be deleted and removed from Delve profiles

Catrinescu noted that the revised July 17 deletion date for Delve blogs coincides with the end date for creating new classic SharePoint blogs.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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