A couple more products are hitting the Microsoft Graveyard:
Publisher 365 Officially Going Away in October 2026: We mentioned last year that Publisher would no longer be included in Office 365 in October, 2026. We had assumed that it would still continue to work if you had it installed, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. According to Office Watch, Publisher 365 will stop working entirely on October 13, 2026. And as it stands right now, Microsoft Word doesn’t have a way to import Publisher files, and the recommended method for moving Publisher documents into Word is basically to export the Publisher file to PDF and then import that PDF into Word – and you can imagine how well that works. So hopefully Microsoft will figure this out before that point as I have a handful of Publisher files that I still occasionally access that I really don’t want to have to recreate in something else.- Skype is Going Away Next Month: This was a long time coming, but Skype in all shapes and forms will go away on May 5th. Skype was once a very popular video chat and communications platform. It was one of the first programs you could reliably use to video call folks (I remember video chatting with family members who were off at University or travelling way back in the day). You could also make and receive calls from regular phones with Skype (which was a big deal back in the day). Skype was acquired in 2011, a Skype For Business version was created, which was rolled into Microsoft Lync, and then eventually into Microsoft Teams (all of which we have used here at one point or another). Now Skype is going away and Microsoft is transitioning everybody to Microsoft Teams. You can read the FAQ from Microsoft here where it show you how to export your Skype data. Microsoft also has a transition video here that shows the pop-up you’ll see in Skype that will show the transition process.
Image created using Microsoft Bing’s AI Generator, which we thought was appropriate, though it didn’t work all that well.