In March of 2015, Microsoft made the decision to deprecate the public web site capabilities of Office 365.  Read more about this here.  This goes into effect September 1, 2017.  Anonymous access is being turned off as early as May 1, 2017.

Once it’s deleted, your visitors as well as admins will no longer have access to the content, images, pages or any other files that reside on their public website.  You can recover it however, through the Recycle Bin but eventually it will be permanently purged.

If you are like me, this may put you in a panic mode (i.e. this entire blog is hosted on the Office 365 SharePoint Online Public Website feature.​ 

There is some saving grace though if you need more time to migrate your public web site.   Microsoft has added an option to keep your public website until March 31, 2018 via the SharePoint Admin Center –> Settings –>  “I’d like to keep my public website until March 31, 2018 option”

Keep blog.png 

PS. Don’t worry about this blog though as I will soon be migrating all content and moving it to a new and hopefully nicer WordPress site very soon

One thought on “SharePoint Online Public Websites in Office 365 are being deleted on Sep 1, 2017”
  1. […] Microsoft has been warning Office 365 customers who are using the public websites feature that they will be deleting them for a few years now.  Now they are following through with their threats. Bottom line, ensure that you migrate all of your Office 365 public websites off to another public website service provider – including your publicly exposed blogs by March 31, 2018. […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *