Expletives fly as admins deal with recommendation to move to Power Automate workflows:
Microsoft has thrown some enterprises into a spin after confirming that, with only a few months' notice, Office 365 connectors within Teams will be cut.
The connectors and webhooks are used to plumb workflows into a Teams channel. For example, users might use them to post an update into a chat stream. This means you can read content and service updates directly in a Teams channel that originated from something like a ticketing platform or a notification from a CI/CD system.
This is the sort of glue that enterprises depend on to make different systems communicate. Or at least it was. From August 15, 2024, Microsoft will block all Connector creation within all clouds. From October 1, 2024, all connectors within all clouds will stop working.
Microsoft has been a little vague on exactly why it is doing this. Its recommendation is for users to switch to Power Automate workflows to "ensure that your integrations are built on an architecture that can grow with your business needs and provide maximum security of your information."
[...] Users have been less than impressed by the news. Comments to the company's post have passed the 100 mark and are generally negative, with some describing the plans as "a greedy cash grab" and others reacting with bewilderment at Microsoft's decision:
[...] Register readers have also been in touch to share the impact the change is having on them. One, who uses RSS feeds and webhooks to send CI/CD notifications to channels, agreed with comments that the change was a "PITA with no benefit to the customer" and noted that the precious few months of notice given wasn't very long.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Sunday July 14 2024, @10:20PM (12 children)
Microsoft says "users will take it the way we give it to them and they will ask for more like good little cattle"
How do you like that fast delivery and un-delivery of features now? This is the true power of services that rely on some else's computer: they can turn that computer off and there's f-all you can do about it.
And the really sad bit: when Orwell wrote that the future would be "a boot stamping on a human face - forever", even he could't imagine that some of the human faces would murmur back "harder, daddy"
(Score: 5, Funny) by Gaaark on Sunday July 14 2024, @10:59PM (1 child)
"It will put on the lotion or it will get the hose."
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2024, @11:06PM
"But Master, I LIKE THE HOSE! Please whip me, then I'll put on the lotion!"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by corey on Sunday July 14 2024, @11:32PM (3 children)
I’m no Microsoft admin so I’m vague on what this article is talking about but my work tries to use Teams for planning and design decisions and whatever else. I’ve commented in the past about how crap it is at all these things and so it should be left as a chat/meetings app only because that’s all it does well. So in the context of this article/news, it sounds good if they’re removing these links with other Microsoft services?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Ox0000 on Sunday July 14 2024, @11:44PM
They are removing it in favor of a wholly different mechanism to do essentially the same thing. It's the forced change that people are railing against. Oh and also that they gave only a handful of months notice.
It sounds like Microsoft solely employs interns as Program Managers (what they call product managers) these days... Or maybe they are following military doctrine: if we don't know what we're doing, then for sure the enemy won't figure it out.
(Score: 4, Informative) by zocalo on Monday July 15 2024, @11:46AM
There are two problems here; the first is that the two versions of each app are not fully feature comparable; one app has features and functionality that the other lacks, and vice versa, and it's anyone's guess whether the missing functionality from the WebApp will be implemented at a future date or not. The second is that Microsoft has apparently decided it's now perfectly OK to enshitify their apps even further by unilaterally removing or retarding existing functionality, which may be because the underlying code is so badly written it's getting dropped rather than debugged as part of their current security focus. Microsoft's stance seems to be that, whether it does what you need ot not, you're going to move to the WebApp version PDQ, so deal with it.
The upshot is that in both apps, and especially Outlook, you're either continually going back and forth between the modes, or resorting to OWA, to get the features you want, or going through rounds of a bunch of colleagues asking each other "WTF happened to...?" because it's been moved somewhere else, or removed entirely. We're now seriously considering deploying Thunderbird and going back to Slack just to get some stability.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 15 2024, @07:16PM
You're using the wrong term.
If someone claims to be an "admin" a "sysadmin" a "network admin" or an "IT guy" when all they really know how to do is reboot, search the Microsoft forums, can't think outside the Microsoft bullshit box, they are a "point and click admin" or a "fisher price my first operating system admin".
These are the people who aren't motivated to do anything other than the easy and bare minimum.
They don't learn and grow over their careers, they don't come up with new solutions to problems, and they stagnate and drain a company.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 15 2024, @01:41AM (5 children)
What it means is that noobs are in charge at Microsoft.
It's the noobs who'd see 1990s DLLs etc still being used in Windows and go "Oh no, that's a bad thing, get rid of that ASAP"
Whereas the Enterprise people see "Great, there's stability, we can build OUR big and complicated stuff on that foundation".
You'd be stupid to write millions of lines of code that relies on a "foundation" that changes every 12-18 months. Who keeps migrating their large factories to new locations every other year?
The problem is what are your options nowadays? Linux doesn't have that stability in practice - they're only recently talking about it with Carrier Grade Linux, but that just counts as talk for now (see other talk: https://ciq.com/blog/why-a-frozen-linux-kernel-isnt-the-safest-choice-for-security/ [ciq.com] ). Whereas the "Old Microsoft"[1] proved they were committed towards backward compatibility for at least two decades. With the "New Microsoft", you maybe get 2 years.
As the Japanese saying goes:
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061106-01/?p=29123 [microsoft.com]
[2] https://www.longpelaexpertise.com.au/ezine/IBMBackwardCompatibility.php [longpelaexpertise.com.au]
(Score: 4, Touché) by khallow on Monday July 15 2024, @03:53AM
When you say "that stability" what in the world are you referring to? There's a reason mainframes have never used Windows ever.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday July 15 2024, @10:03AM
They're not noobs: they've been utter tools for 50 years. They're very seasoned, very mature incompetents.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday July 15 2024, @04:20PM
I despise when coders willfully ruin backward compatibility. More often than not it requires very little effort to keep old interfaces in place. Yes, I am aware of the disadvantages and overheads, but more often than not it is broken purely as a stylistic choice. And when you look at the bigger picture, it is awfully wasteful. Ultimately it results in older hardware being thrown out, when it didn't really need to be.
Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday July 15 2024, @06:41PM
You don't have to freeze the kernel to maintain backward compatibility. You just need the ABI to still exist. If you want to run a program from 1995, you'll have a much better chance with Linux than with MS.
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Monday July 29 2024, @06:01PM
>> Linux doesn't have that stability in practice
Oh Puhlease.... Over 95% of all servers on AWS and Azure are running Linux.
Our servers are Linux-based and typically have uptimes of years.
One time we tried some windows servers and the best uptimes we saw were around 2-3 weeks. Note: That was before Microsoft started making windows compulsorily update and reboot every week.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2024, @11:05PM (1 child)
What is it that I'm enraged about? Oh, Office 365? And Teams? Oh, well, I don't use them, so I could hardly care less.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday July 16 2024, @03:00PM
Then why post?
I'm just here to say that Sony invented removing features you paid for two decades ago with OtherOS, and the other, equally evil corporations are following in their footsteps.
What, you thought Microsoft was less evil than Sony? Amazon did it with their Ring doorbell. All corporations are evil.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EvilSS on Monday July 15 2024, @01:32AM (2 children)
(Score: 4, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday July 15 2024, @08:47AM (1 child)
I very much doubt that. Microsoft doesn't know the first thing about security. And if they did that for that reason, you can be pretty sure they'd be tooting their horn about doing what needs to be done for the safety of the users even if it has to hurt, and they're not.
What Microsoft does know everything about is nickel-and-diming the users when they're nicely locked-in...
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday July 15 2024, @01:10PM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday July 15 2024, @04:27AM (18 children)
My company has gone from being a properly self-administered IT outfit for almost 40 years to using Microsoft's cloud services because our old, competent IT manager has retired and has been replaced by a young MCSE monkey who can't even type a console command.
Seriously, I like the guy, but he's pretty hopeless: we still have a lot of the old infrastructure around because our production processes depend on it, and I ended up doing that on my nonexistent spare time because he can't.
I've been warning my boss for a 2 years that if we put the company's balls in Microsoft's hand, they can squeeze whenever they want and there's nothing we can do about it.
This will prove my point very nicely: our production machines regularly report their status on Teams and he likes it. When they stop reporting, I'll be able to tell him "I told you so" as I reactivate our old internal RSS feed.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday July 15 2024, @08:01AM (17 children)
Replying to myself here, but...
My boss stormed into my office and asked why I wasn't doing something about the spam Microsoft has given itself the right to tack on to OUR automated messages in OUR PRIVATE CHANNELS from OUR webhooks since July 9.
So I got to tell him "I told you so..." a lot sooner than I anticipated. And also, the new Power Automate shit isn't compatible with the pymsteams module, and it doesn't even work in private channels no more. So he's not a happy camper 🙂
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday July 15 2024, @10:30AM (16 children)
I do have to wonder whether he's starting to ask himself if somebody actually did get fired for choosing Microsoft.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday July 15 2024, @12:08PM (14 children)
The sad thing is, my company really isn't run by bean counters.
My boss told me he would have hired a knowledgeable IT guy if he could've, but he didn't find a suitable candidate and he said he really did interview quite a few before finally deciding to hire this one and go with Microsoft cloud garbage as the least preferred option, because that's the extent of the guy's competences.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Monday July 15 2024, @07:08PM (3 children)
It can be hard to find competent people. It can also be a case of being too specific in experience requirements or it can be a pay peanuts, get monkeys situation. These days it can also be insufficient workplace flexibility.
Just some possibilities since I don't even know where you work.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday July 16 2024, @03:07PM (2 children)
It can be hard to find competent people.
Competence seems to be a thing of the past! Of course, when everybody's underpaid, why should anybody show competence?
The Ernie Ball corporation seems to have [cnet.com] been able to find compatence, but that was a long time ago. The stupidity and greed in industry has grown exponentially since then.
We're headed for another world-wide economic depression, ironically thanks to greed.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday July 17 2024, @11:14PM (1 child)
Agreed. A key to finding competence is to drop enough corporate BS to attract it in the first place.
I do believe we are heading for an economic collapse as an effect of an ongoing epidemic of head in ass disease.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Friday July 19 2024, @09:35PM
I do believe we are heading for an economic collapse
History says we're heading for a 1930s type depression, but not from stupidity, from greed. When the disparity between the very rich and the median becomes too great, there has always been a depression.
Grandma McGrew told me that the 1920s only roared for the rich, she was born in 1903. The book Only Yesterday [mcgrewbooks.com], written in 1933, is frighteningly similar to this decade.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 1) by atwork on Tuesday July 16 2024, @02:57AM (8 children)
So you had to go cloud because the CEO read about it and "everybody else is doing it".
As my mother used to say when I was a dumb teenager and tried that excuse for doing something stupid: "If everybody else was jumping off a 10 storey building, would you?".
I've just realised that cloud proponents in our workplaces are the mental equivalents of dumb teenagers.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday July 16 2024, @03:11PM (7 children)
Indeed. Only a fool uses "the cloud" (previously known as "rented servers") any more, considering how cheap local storage is these days. You can get a thumb drive that holds a terabyte, I can remember when governments didn't have that much storage.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Tuesday July 16 2024, @07:07PM (6 children)
The cloud leverages economies of scale. They have backup generators, redundant internet with fat pipes, and teams of IT monkeys to monitor and maintain the hardware.
Doing that on-prem for all but the largest companies is just going to be an inferior and more poorly managed setup with larger downtimes when something fails.
Sure you can get a thumb drive that holds a terabyte -- but how do you robustly and reliably back it up daily to multiple redundant geographically separated regions. It's pretty easy to do with the cloud and relatively affordable too. Just look at the infrastructure you'd need to come close if you do it yourself -- just to backup your one thumb drive, you'd multiple dedicated servers at multiple sites with multiple terabytes of storage each, each of which needs to be continually maintained and serviced for its own updates, hardware failures etc.
Surely you aren't just going to back it up to another bunch of thumb drives in your office? And you think people using 'rented servers' are the fools?
(Score: 1) by atwork on Wednesday July 17 2024, @02:11AM (1 child)
It's cheaper for us to back up our critical on-prem mid-size DB to tape and pay a contractor to come in, pick up the backup tape and take it offsite than it is to multi-region the same DB in cloud-land.
It is also more reliable - 0 hours down in the last 5 years vs around 12 hours down for a not-quite-as-critical cloudy DB that got "re-configured" for us by the hosting company a few months ago.
And it is far, far more performant.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Wednesday July 17 2024, @06:21PM
Yeah, everybody has that anecdote, including me :)
And its absolutely true. Until its not. One day the raid controller or motherboard on the server hosting it dies in a thunderstorm. Worse it takes out your tape machine as well. And 5 years? You are still in the warranty period of the original hardware, I'm guessing. This is the honeymoon period. Wait till it starts to get creaky. You probably haven't had the joy of having something fail and discovering your spare [tape system/raid controller/whatever else] is a lemon, and it dies itself a week later, and now you are scrambling to get a replacement and a new spare and its discontinued and is no longer supported or available.
Or what happens when your building catches fire? Or a hurricane hits and knocks out internet to your building for a few days. Can you promote a redundant hot copy of your critical database to be your master read/write instance in another region in 30 seconds? Maybe you don't need to ... if your building is on fire, maybe your database being online is no longer all that critical, since everyone relying on it has been evacuated. Maybe if it burns in the fire you don't actually need the data that was generated in the last 5 hours of work since the last tape was picked up. But there are lots of applications where going offline at any time, or loseing even just the morning data from the last few hours is incredibly costly.
In the aggregate case, the cloud tends to be more reliable. They've got more redundancy than almost anyone -- redundant power, redundant cooling, redundant internet, redundant hardware, spare hardware than all but the largest organizations.
There's a lot of ways to do hosting. From (so called) "serverless" hosted services to, managed instances, to self managed virtual machines. Which is the right option? Depends. Depends on how much you want to manage it yourself and how much internal expertise you have. For you, maybe you could have done it better with more self-managed system -- for other companies that don't ALSO run critical databases on prem - the hosting service is going to do a better job than they ever could.
And lets be honest, there is a lot of hubris around the idea that "doing it yourself on prem" is not going to result in a botched "re-configured DB" incident. I bet if you go into the average company or organization and look at their on prem team it is more likely than not you probably wouldn't be any more keen to have THEM manage your databases than the cloud provider. ;)
So when you put your own team on a pedestal is it really justified? We can't ALL have hired the best and the brightest! That's just math. So even if YOUR team is exceptional and things are better of in their hands than someone else (whether its a contractor or a cloud company? (what's the difference, right?), can you really say that "Doing it on-prem means a better team is handling it" is generally applicable (e.g. to the majority of companies / organizations?)
As for performance -- you get what you pay for. Holds true on-prem or in the cloud.
And I agree with you on one other point too - the cloud generally costs more. It's a for profit business after all. There are cases where it can save you money, (highly volatile scale needs for example), but for most of us the cloud is more expensive but a better value proposition.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday July 17 2024, @11:09PM (2 children)
Apparently those economies of scale get plowed into the CEO's new yacht fund.
You're going to have to do your own backups independantly of the cloud provider in case they tick the wrong box and sorta kinda delete all your data and the backup (it's really happened). You still have to maintain connectivity for the office and the LAN to support the PCs there. You still need someone to manage and set up the services on-prem or in the cloud.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday July 18 2024, @10:01PM (1 child)
"You're going to have to do your own backups independantly of the cloud provider in case they tick the wrong box and sorta kinda delete all your data and the backup (it's really happened)"
Use at least 2 separate cloud providers. The cloud provider going out of business, or your account getting locked, or closed, or deleted for any reason is a risk. The "cloud company" is an obvious single point of failure. You wouldn't set up a system on prem where there was one button someone could push that would delete your production environment and all your backups at once would you? Of course not. And you shouldn't do that if you are using cloud systems either.
"Apparently those economies of scale get plowed into the CEO's new yacht fund."
Why else does one become a CEO?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday July 20 2024, @08:38PM
Now you're at a point where it makes more sense to do on-prem and consider cloud for DR.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday July 19 2024, @09:30PM
When I worked for the state of Illinois, for a while part of my job was to back up the data from the Iles Park building. A tape drive, took half an hour to forty minutes but you didn't have to babysit it.
You should ignore the salesmen and look at the actual cost. Of course you wouldn't back it up on a thumb drive, that was just illustration.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2024, @12:57AM
Move everyone to Apple?
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Monday July 29 2024, @06:04PM
Probably not. For some reason all upper managements seem to have a complete blind spot about the existence of worthwhile Microsoft alternatives.
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Tuesday July 16 2024, @02:53PM (1 child)
despite Microsoft continually raping them, businesses will still cluelessly keep basing new projects and everything else on Microsoft tech and mindlessly keep buying more Microsoft products.
I mean how bad does it have to get before business finally get an actual clue.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday July 16 2024, @03:16PM
Look back almost a century to 1928. [mcgrewbooks.com] That's where industry is now.
Note: most italics in that file are links. It's a BOOK from 1933, not a business document. Making links underlined was a bad decision that shows that HTML's designers never read books, only business documents.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron