As was expected, but not officially confirmed until now, Microsoft Corp. is discontinuing the SharePoint Online Public Website service, a feature enabling users to create public-facing websites in SharePoint. The discontinuation will be effective January 2015. While new customers won’t have access to the service, existing customers will be able to use the feature for at least two years.

Microsoft discussed the changes to SharePoint in an official support post stating that, “Office 365 customers will have access to third-party offerings that will enable them to easily integrate their public presence with their Office 365 service.” More details are expected to be announced in January next year.

Responding to the move, Microsoft said that the “difficult” changes are all part of “the evolution of the Office 365 service”, in an effort to “focus on future investments while broadening our partnership with industry leaders.”

The SharePoint Online Public Website feature was designed to give its users what Microsoft has said was the most basic online presence, and so in an attempt to offer “more robust tools and solutions”, third party solutions will be offered in the future. These third party offerings will come at discount prices for Office 365 subscribers, it was reported in a Q&A about the recent changes.

Microsoft has advised that all content and data be manually migrated by users of the service, and all data should be backed-up before switching to any of the upcoming solutions. Lastly it was stated that if new users want to be considered as an existing customer with a two-year minimum user guarantee then they will have to sign up before the end of January.

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