Azure & Office 365

Now the Bad news from today Article  (Information about upcoming changes to the SharePoint Online Public Website) http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/3027254 is Microsoft will discontinue Office 365 Public facing website.

I was reading this rumors from last couple of days but today finally Microsoft revealed that it is dropping the Public Website feature from SharePoint Online as of January 2015 🙁

The article says that any new customer who will sign up for Office 365 after January 2014 won’t have option for a Public Websites in his SharePoint Online tenant site. However a relief for existing customers is that SharePoint Online Public Website will continue for a minimum of two years depending on updates from Microsoft. Again a rumor which came out is that Microsoft will ask all its Office 365 customer who wants to continue using Public facing Website to look out with a 3rd party vendor who will support Office 365 and will help customers to integrate it with Microsoft. Microsoft will disclose its 3rd party vendor in January 2015.

As far as I know that existing customers who are using Public Web Sites will not see any price change\reduction for their Office 365 or SharePoint Online as a result of Microsoft cutting this feature however the third-party offerings will be available at discounted pricing rates for Office 365 customers. Just copied the most important line below:

Why is Microsoft making this change?
As part of the evolution of the Office 365 service, we periodically evaluate the capabilities of the service to make sure that we’re delivering the utmost value to customers. Today, we’re making a difficult decision to discontinue the SharePoint Online Public Website feature. This lets us then focus on future investments while broadening our partnership with industry leaders.

For more information check Information about upcoming changes to the SharePoint Online Public Website at  http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/3027254

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