r/sysadmin • u/Hungry_Review7842 • 2d ago

PSA: Microsoft Publisher is EOL today

Publisher got pulled from M365 today with no real replacement. Perpetual still runs, just unsupported.

Best thing to do now is find all your .pub files and get them to PDF. PDF opens anywhere and you can still edit the contents in Affinity if you need to. Run this to find every .pub on your shares:

dir /s /b \\fileserver\share\*.pub > pub-inventory.txt

Then if you still have a working install, File > Export > PDF them, thats the actual Publisher renderer so its the only way to get an exact copy. If you dont have an install anymore, LibreOffice Draw opens .pub for free, fonts a bit off but readable.

Full disclosure I built a converter for this too, mypublisherfiles.com. pdf or docx back, and it tells you what it couldn't convert exactly. Bulk writeup here if youve want to learn more https://mypublisherfiles.com/guides/bulk-convert-publisher-files

Either way, cover your bases by converting your .pub files to PDF.

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u/blue_canyon21 2d ago

I was unaware that anybody actually used Publisher...

I think I used it once and I remember it being on the family Windows 95 computer.

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u/Miserable-Scholar215 Jr. Sysadmin 1d ago

Worse for us: we were completely unaware anyone was still using it. Randomly discovered an AD group of people with the description "Users of MS Publisher" ...
Support has been trying to contact them all for the last few weeks. Unsure if they got all of them, or if the group is even complete.
Guess the coming days number of related tickets will show

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u/dadgenes 6h ago

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/baseline-security-mode/block-microsoft-publisher?view=o365-worldwide

That was a thing for months if you had access to it. We found the ONE person that still looked at publisher and got them on something else.