M365 Changelog: Business Connectivity Services (BCS) retirement

MC679737 – SharePoint has a long history of helping users work with external data inside the SharePoint user experience. As SharePoint has evolved into a cloud-first service, so too have the options for customers that wish to integrate with external data sources. To simplify these options and provide the best experience for these scenarios going forward, Microsoft is announcing its plan to retire Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in Microsoft 365 and focus on Microsoft Power Apps as its replacement technology.

Key points:

• Major: Retirement
• Timeline:
  • October 2, 2023: Retirement announcement and customers can proactively set a property to block Business Connectivity services features within their tenant.
  • October 30, 2023: Microsoft will begin blocking Business Connectivity Services features based on the tenant property set by the customer.
  • January 8, 2024: Microsoft will block Business Connectivity Services features in new Microsoft 365 tenants by default, as well as in tenants who haven’t used the feature since October 30, 2023.
  • September 30, 2024: Business Connectivity Services is fully retired in Microsoft 365.
• Action: Review and assess impact.

How this will affect your organization:

If your organization uses Business Connectivity Services, it will no longer function after September 30, 2024. This includes features such as:

• External lists
• External columns
• External content types
• Business Connectivity Services hybrid solutions

What you need to do to prepare:

Microsoft encourages customers to explore using Power Apps to replace their Business Connectivity Services solutions. Although there’s no direct migration from Business Connectivity Services to Power Apps, it supports a modern, cloud-first external data connectivity experience. Power Apps can integrate with a variety of Microsoft 365 services and external data sources through its extensible connector technology, including SharePoint, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and others. It also supports integrating with on-premises data sources through the on-premises data gateway.

Learn more:

• Support update for Business Connectivity Services in Microsoft 365
• Support article with additional resources

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