Classic SharePoint Blogs are Being Retired in SharePoint Online

Three weeks ago, news has broke that Delve Blogs are being retired, and since then, Microsoft has updated the messaging to also include the fact that Classic SharePoint Blogs are Being Retired in SharePoint Online! Let’s look at the details!

On December 4^th, Microsoft published Message Center MC197403 , which covers what we already knew on Delve Blogs, as well as the information on Classic Blogs. Let’s focus on the messaging on Classic Blog Sites. Here is what was announced in the Message Center:

As you can see already, unlike Delve Blogs, Classic SharePoint blogs will not be deleted by Microsoft! The only real impact so far is that from a UI perspective, users will be discouraged from creating new classic SharePoint blogs, and starting on July 17^th 2020, classic blog sites will only be able to be created by PowerShell, or other APIs. This retirement will not stop users from creating blog posts on existing blog sites, it simply stops the ability to create blog sites trough the User Interface!

My take on It

I think that communication sites are a great replacement of classic SharePoint blog sites, and this change was imminent as Microsoft is trying to push more customers to use the modern experiences. This service deprecation is also done right, in the sense that no customer data will be deleted, and even past the July 17^th deadline, an administrator that knows what they are doing will still be able to create a new Classic SharePoint Blog Site without too much trouble.

What are the next steps?

As an Office 365 Administrator, your next steps should really be to first find out how used are classic SharePoint Blogs in your tenant, and, start migrating them to modern. There is no timeline on when this template will fully stop working, so this can be a lower priority item, but I would recommend doing it sooner than later! Microsoft (and the community) actually updated the SharePoint modernization scanner to include the ability to Modernize Delve blogs and classic blogs. Make sure to read that guide, and start testing out the modernization tool!

What is your take on this? Are you still using Classic SharePoint Blogs? Do you agree with the way Microsoft is handling this retirement? Let me know in the comments!