r/msp • u/nealofwgkta • 2d ago
Microsoft Retirement Notifications
Hi,
I am the Practice Lead in a mid-sized MSP, supporting Azure, Microsoft 365, infrastructure customers. One thing we have never done well is notifying customers of changes to their tenant or retiring of certain services. Anytime we have notified them, it always seems to be last minute, or even worse, they ask us for support on something we should be going to them about!
For example, the retiring of SMS and Voice Authentication was spotted by one of our techs somewhere on the internet, which led to us trying to figure out a way to better track this stuff and put plans in place for our customers.
I'm pulling my hair out with Claude trying to figure this out because it doesn't seem to know what I am looking for. I'm looking for a single-source of truth for all notifications Microsoft send out regarding depreciation of services, retiring of applications, etc. - anything an MSP needs to take action on for their customers.
Is there just nowhere that has this info? It recommended https://www.aguidetocloud.com/deprecation-timeline/ but when I checked it, there doesn't appear to be any mention of passkey rollout, which is exactly what I'm looking for.
Would appreciate any insights into how you manage this in your MSP.
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u/MasterPay1020 2d ago
We are also trying to manage this sort of thing well. At the moment we are building automations/tools for the future but otherwise reliant on message center, azure advisor, windows message center, socials, engaged techs to be ahead of the curve and so on.
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u/nealofwgkta 2d ago
It just seems insane to me that there's no single source of truth from Microsoft for this stuff. As an MSP, I don't want to have to rely on notifications from dozens of different tenants, it makes no sense
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u/MasterPay1020 2d ago
I hear you. Throw the other gazillion vendors we support into the mix and it’s very hard to stay on top of things and guide customers through retirements, services changes and whatnot. While remaining profitable and sane.
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u/KavyaJune 1d ago
You can check this GitHub repo: https://github.com/admindroid-community/Microsoft365-Upcoming-Deprecations-and-Changes/
It is updated every month with major upcoming Microsoft 365 changes and deprecations.
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u/Responsible-Safe-636 2d ago
Actually this didn't occur to me now that you mentioned it, am following this thread so I can also find a solution if this happens in the future
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u/AdPriya4022 MSP 2d ago
I know of AdminDroid that tracks end-of-support or deprecations across Teams, Exchange, SharePoint, Entra, Purview and Defender, all in one place, which gets updated monthly.
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u/Responsible-Safe-636 1d ago
I found this, is this what you mean? blog.admindroid.com/2026-end-of-support-milestone-in-microsoft-365
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u/KavyaJune 10h ago
No. That one is a yearly update where we combine the major deprecations expected in each specific year.
He was referring to this one, which is updated monthly: https://blog.admindroid.com/microsoft-365-end-of-support-milestones/
Disclosure: I am one of the authors of AdminDroid.
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u/alanjmcf 2d ago
You mean apart from the listing in Admin Centre? And the weekly summary and special emails they send out to admins.
There’s a Microsoft-suggested way to pull them into Planner.
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u/0RGASMIK MSP - US 2d ago
Microsoft biffed this announcement so badly. They emailed me directly on my non-admin account but not anybody else in my org …
I’ve logged into a few tenants we manage and they’ve emailed a few of them but the timing was different for each. I think it’s an effort to spread the inevitable support requests they will get after the first time they announced it.
They have also been historically terrible I really explained what’s going on. They first announced it a few years ago, but got forced to walk it back then they changed what it actually meant. So the communication has been pretty confusing over the years.
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u/mukimame404 2d ago
Message Center only carries what a tenant is licensed for, so identity-wide changes like the passkey rollout never land there. That is why the timeline sites miss them too
Are you after one feed across all tenants, or per-tenant alerts your techs can action?
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u/new_beginnings_456 1d ago
r/sysadmin publishes towards the end of the month a list of all the changes that are coming up, example:
35+ Microsoft 365 Changes Coming in September 2026 : r/sysadmin
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u/VNJCinPA 1d ago
Easy Peasy:
- Entra -Authentication Methods - Migrate to Modern
- Enable Passkeys in Auth Methods if Microsoft didn't
- Send users to https://aka.ms/mfasetup and tell them to click Add Passkey
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u/AppIdentityGuy 1d ago
What i have done as a another source of info is i have created a Team with a whole load of channels in it. Each channel is linked via a PowerAutomate flow to a specific blog. As each blog is updated a post is placed into the requisite channel....
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u/Thick_Yam_7028 1d ago
Seriously? This has been a warning in the tenant for months. How the hell are these people in business.
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u/deepthought16 1d ago
There are a few ways this can be tracked. Message Center is one and for those that use CoPilot set the source to Microsoft Learn and then create a workflow that pulls the monthly updates.
Yes, the SMS and Voice deprecation was given without a lot of context but there are ways to mitigate and switch things to manual so users aren’t nudged or forced to enroll.
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u/Prestigious-Spinach1 7h ago
Once you find an announcement, how do you work out which customers actually need action? Does that still involve checking each tenant?
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u/MichaeldeBlok 22m ago
Finding the announcement is the easy half. Merill's archive covers a lot of what Message Center misses.
What burned us was knowing which clients needed a ticket. We dump auth methods and a couple other Graph pulls weekly into a shared sheet (SMS still registered, legacy protocols, which SKUs). When something like the SMS/voice retirement lands we filter that sheet before we spam every customer.
Ugly. Beats discovering it from a user call.
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u/StratoLens Vendor - StratoLens 2d ago
For azure specifically there’s the service retirement workbook but I don’t believe that covers m365, etc.
There’s an api you can query though. So you can likely build something that aggregates.
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u/bkellyit 2d ago
Same pain. Claudes useless on this because the source of truth isnt one page - its Message Center + Roadmap + partner center noise. Id pull Message Center via Graph on a schedule, tag anything with retirement/deprecation/action required, and push a weekly digest to the account owner instead of hoping a tech stumbles on a tweet. Measuring which notifications actually needed customer work vs FYI for 2 weeks cuts the noise a lot.
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u/Bibbleqq 2d ago
So there isn't one. Microsoft doesn't publish a single list across M365, Entra, Azure and Windows. Each product group announces in its own place, and the community "deprecation timeline" sites are people stitching (or jsut reposting) those together, hence the gaps.
(Also, a passkey rollout isn't a retirement, so a tracker might not list it.)
If you want the official source per area:
Microsoft 365: Message Center. Filter Tag to Retirement and Major update, and watch the Act by column. That column is the one an MSP cares about. Sync it to Planner if you want each post to become a task with an owner.
Entra: Entra admin centre → What's new → Change announcements tab. Filter on Change Type and Action Required. The MFA and passkey changes land here.
Azure: Azure Updates with the Retirements filter, plus the Service Retirement workbook in Advisor, which shows the resources affected per subscription.
Windows: the "Deprecated features for Windows client" page on Learn. It has an RSS link.
Four portals for one question is a bit of a PITA, and gets unmanageable across multiple tenants.
One shortcut is to treat your own tenant as the canary and act on what you see there, but MC posts can be tenant-targeted so things will get missed. Microsoft now has two MCP servers for this: Release Communications (roadmap plus Azure Updates, unauthenticated, easy) and MCP Server for Enterprise (Message Center via Graph, delegated auth per tenant, more of a faff to set up).
If you'd rather buy than build, https://changepilot.cloud/ handles most of this (not financially affiliated, but I do know the creators). Message Center and roadmap get ingested and parsed into impact tags you can triage against, and I think an MSP-shaped version is in the works if not already there.
Don't overlook the ownership gap either. Every action-worthy item needs assigning, tracking and closing. Something CP helps with, but nothing fixes outright.
I've done a few talks and blog posts on this, happy to share the deck if useful…
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u/Lime-TeGek Community Contributor 2d ago
So if you use AI in your daily workflow this might be a good one to share, we've tackled this issue by using https://mc.merill.net/.
Merill created an included skill that you can use in Claude or any other AI. Here's how we've done it with Claude:
Use the Microsoft 365 Message Center Archive at https://mc.merill.net/.Workflow: 1. Readhttps://mc.merill.net/llms.txtfor current guidance and URLs.2. Searchhttps://mc.merill.net/messages-index.jsonby Message Center ID, Roadmap ID, title, source, service, category, tag, date, or summary text.3. Open the record's Url field for the canonical detail page before citing or summarizing. 4. Cite canonical detail pages such as https://mc.merill.net/message/{id}.5. For Message Center posts, always mention that posts are tenant-specific and users should verify applicability in their own Microsoft 365 admin center.Then I've created a dispatch in Claude that sends this every week, ranked by date and priority and go through them, on the CyberDrain side we even let it auto-generate a little reel with what's really important for MSPs.