Thanks to a tweet by Tim Milan of Omaha, I heard today that Microsoft Delve blogs are to be deleted in a few months.
Ding Dong #Microsoft Delve is Dead!
— Tim Milan🏳️🌈 (@tmilan) November 22, 2019
•December 18th, 2019, tenants will not have the ability to create new Delve blogs.
•January 18th, 2020 the ability to create new posts will be disabled.
•Beginning April 17th, 2020, existing Delve blogs will be deleted#Microsoft
Milan’s news came from Office 365 Premier Support in response to a ticket he’d submitted. The email is as follows:
Delve was first announced alongside the Office Graph in 2014 at SharePoint Conference. Even though it’s only been out for a little over five years, the retirement of Delve in general has been a topic of speculation for nearly two years now (and perhaps longer for others). Some have wondered whether to invest time learning and promoting the app anymore, and perhaps this news will help guide those decisions.
Important dates:
The following points are taken from the email body seen above.
- Beginning December 18th, 2019, tenants can no longer create new Delve blogs.
- Beginning January 18th, 2020, you can no longer create new posts in existing blogs
- Beginning April 17th, 2020, existing Delve blogs will be deleted and removed from Delve profiles.
What now?
If you read this post and asked yourself, “What’s a Delve blog?” don’t worry about it. It was a convenient feature that allowed your average user to create and maintain a blog they could share in the organization.
If you read this post and realized you have hundreds of user and group blogs out there to manage and just a few months to figure it out, you have some choices to consider.
The email shown earlier in this post suggests creating communication sites and adding News, Yammer, and Stream web parts for engagement but this isn’t a good plan for all blogs as not all users can create sites for themselves. Even those that can create sites may find site creation and management a bit too complex or too large of a scope compared to running a simple blog.
You could consider creating WordPress or Blogger sites and migrating your posts there. Unfortunately, there is no RSS feed for Delve blogs to export. You’d be manually copying and pasting (or recreating) posts.
You might consider disabling Delve if you’d like to prevent users from beginning something that’ll be removed soon. You can do this through the SharePoint admin center for all users (see directions here). Keep in mind this disables more than just blog creation – read the description before proceeding.
No matter what you choose, there’s no easy way forward. I would suggest getting your users involved in saving (print to PDF or copy/paste) posts of importance so that they can be posted as documents elsewhere, or recreated at a later time in another space.
Ready, set, change management!
Delve itself will remain, however, right? Wondering what all someone might see if they click on the name of someone who created an item in SharePoint Online if they are going to either replace or retire Delve.