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All Too Easy to Miss the Need to Replace Office 365 Connectors with Teams Workflows
On May 22, 2026, Microsoft completed the retirement of Office 365 Connectors from Teams. After that date, connectors stopped functioning, bringing an almost two-year retirement process to an end. Many tenants probably never noticed because existing webhook-based integrations often sat untouched for years until they stopped working.
Microsoft’s proposed replacement is Power Automate workflows. All of which is fine and dandy if you keep an eye open for notices posted in Microsoft development blogs, noticed the warning Microsoft included in channel posts created using an Office 365 connector (Figure 1), or read the linked documentation.
I did none of that and had forgotten to take my own advice from a June 2024 article written following the original announcement for the retirement of connectors.
Webhook Flagged as a Security Problem in a Script
My only excuse is that I was busy with other things. It’s a poor excuse, but who has the time to check every detail within a Microsoft 365 tenant. My attention was brought to the issue when I received an issue for the Microsoft 365 for IT Pros GitHub repository reporting a potential security problem had been detected in a script. The code included an Office 365 connector webhook for an article written in 2020. The webhook is useless following the demise of connectors, but after I closed the issue, I examined the code in more detail to figure out what it does and what needs to be done to make it function with Power Automate.
I hate looking at old code because I see all the mistakes I made years ago. In this case, reviving the script didn’t demand much. The hardest part was remembering which channel was the target for posting. Once that was established, I chose the Workflows option for the channel and selected the Send webhook alerts to a channel workflow (Figure 2).
The workflow generates a substitute webhook to replace the old version used by the Office 365 connector. The idea of the script is to retrieve Microsoft 365 roadmap items using an RSS feed, parse the items to find those created within the last seven days, and post each item to the target channel as an adaptive card.
I cleaned up the code a little to make payload generation easier and to reflect the categories of roadmap items now in use (for example, Stream is now Microsoft Clipchamp, and Microsoft Purview didn’t exist in 2020). After plugging in the new webhook, the script ran without a hitch and new Microsoft 365 roadmap items appeared in the channel (Figure 3).
You can download the fixed-up script from the Microsoft 365 for IT Pros GitHub repository.
Posting Service Health Updates
The June 2024 article referred to above uses Microsoft 365 Service health data as an example of posting useful information in an adaptive card to a Teams channel. Given that I was in the business of updating scripts, I reviewed the script described in that article and made the code a little more bulletproof and aligned with today’s standards. Figure 4 shows the kind of output the script posts to a channel, again using the Send webhook alerts to a channel workflow.
The first batch of changes didn’t take long, but the cards posted to the channel included an annoying footer saying Tony Redmond used a Workflow template to send this card. The solution to get rid of the footer is to select the workflow and use the Manage link to go to the Power Automate portal. You can then save the workflow with a different name (and webhook) and use that instead. The footer doesn’t appear because Power Automate treats the copied workflow as a custom workflow rather than a workflow created from a template. Remember to remove the original workflow and to give the new workflow a name that explains its purpose.
Code Degrades Over Time
The experience was yet another reminder that code, like humans, degrades over time. Events like the retirement of Office 365 connectors, together with many other changes rolling out to Microsoft 365 tenants, make it important to keep an eye on scripts to make sure that they continue to work as expected. I wish I was better at this aspect of tenant management than I am, but c’est la vie.
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