The Demise of the Office 365 Facebook Connector

Office 365 Notification MC189263 informs tenants who have been using the Office 365 Facebook connector that Microsoft retired the connector on September 4, 2019. The notification was posted on August 30, so tenants had just five days to react to the news. This is probably due to Microsoft’s assertion that their “telemetry indicates limited use of the connector to Facebook.” In other words, this connector wasn’t used all that much. Perhaps that’s because if you want to have a conversation in Facebook, that’s where the conversation happens.

Upon retirement, the connector is no longer able to fetch information from Facebook pages and import them into Office 365 Groups or a Teams channel (Figure 1).

You can also use Office 365 connectors with SharePoint Online and Yammer. However, I confess to only ever using connectors with Office 365 Groups and Teams.

Conversation Starters

Like all the Office 365 connectors, the function of the Facebook connector is to notify users that some information exists in a network source (in this case, one or more Facebook pages). The items are usually not complete copies of the information available in the network source and the idea is that people will see the items and start conversations about them. As you can see from Figure 2, the item posted in Teams might start a discussion about how to improve the horrible statistics of the book’s Facebook page!

Remove Connectors from View

Now that the Facebook connector has met its demise, Microsoft recommends that tenants with the connector configured for Teams or Groups should remove it. Although no great harm will come from keeping the connector in place, it won’t fetch any further data and is therefore a useless appendage on the side of an app.

---

Although Microsoft has retired the Office 365 Connector for Facebook, there’s still a ton of Office 365 connectors available. Learn how to use them with Office 365 Groups and Teams in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.