Sean Wallbridge
Edit/Update – November 19, 2014
Microsoft posted an update today with an even more clearly stated “die” date. So heads up that you need to grab your already deprecated tags and notes data by December 31, 2014 folks…
Original Post
Office 365 is Agile. Telemetry (Microsoft’s fancy word for we are watching what features you use and killing those you don’t) is amped up and the casualties are starting to come. This week the victim of neglect and thus on the chopping block is “Tags and Notes” in SharePoint Online.
All the gory details can be found here: SharePoint Online Tags & Notes feature retired
But the gist is:
- It isn’t “deprecated”, it is “retired”. It wasn’t being used enough to stay as a feature
- Users can no longer create new tags and notes or access existing ones
- For a brief period, existing tags and notes can be archived into .csv files and then exported from the SharePoint Admin Center (yuck) by an admin (I don’t want that job)
- Tags & Notes button on the ribbon will still be visible but disabled
- Note board and Tag Cloud web parts will show up as blank when added to a page (delightful)
- Existing web parts will show up as blank on the page. Edit the page and remove them
- Social tags will no longer appear in the tags refiner
- Yammer is its predecessor. On Premise (And if you can’t Cloud), Yammer won’t be a fit but if you are in the Cloud, Yammer is a great/better fit
Change is a coming. Get used to it Online.