Microsoft 365 – MAJOR UPDATE – Business Connectivity Services (BCS) retiring – If we are using in any of our project we need to plan / action need to be taken

Hi All,

Greetings for the day!!!

Today one of the Microsoft 365 MAJOR / CRITICAL / IMPORTANT UPDATE

MAJOR UPDATE – Business Connectivity Services (BCS) retirement

This is good opportunity to discuss in our organization / with our customers 🙂

Details

• Microsoft is announcing its plan to retire Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in Microsoft 365 and focus on Microsoft Power Apps as its replacement technology
• Timelines:
  • 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.

PowerShell to block the BCS features

• We will be using following two PowerShell CMDLETs
  • Connect-SPOService
  • Set-SPOTenant

Connect-SPOService -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com
Set-SPOTenant -BusinessConnectivityServiceDisabled $true

• To have “BusinessConnectivityServiceDisabled” flag available, we must have SharePoint Online Management Shell version 16.0.24120.12000 or higher 

How this will affect our organization

• If our 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

Action we need to take

• Microsoft encourages customers to explore using Power Apps to replace their Business Connectivity Services solutions
• Power App 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.

If you are new with PowerApps, we have very good series of PowerApp articles, kindly please have a look – https://knowledge-junction.in/category/technology-articles/power-platform/power-apps/

Thanks for reading ! HAVE a FANTASTIC LEARNING 🙂 LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 🙂

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