This major change to SharePoint Online APIs might break some of your automation in Microsoft 365 / Office 365

A few days ago, Microsoft announced in its service announcements that by mid-October, it’s retiring specific APIs from SharePoint Online that can “affect web part migration.” It doesn’t read like a significant change until you dig into what’s being discontinued.

It reads:

“Retiring certain WebPartPagesWebService methods affecting web part migration”

But, it’s not just web part migration that might be affected. After carefully reading what modules are affected (keep reading), the impact might be much more severe, especially for larger organizations that use automated site creation and workflows, such as project site creation, governance provisioning workflows etc.

What’s the impact:

• If you have a customization in your company’s Office 365 site that allows you to create sites, pages and add web parts on them automatically - you’re likely going to be affected.
• If you’re using 3rd tools, including in-house workflows, that make it easier to create pages and templates (for example, project sites created automatically) - you’re also likely going to be affected unless your vendor issues a patch.
• If you’re using SharePoint Online classic experience and it’s functionality to create sites from a template - you also are very likely going to be affected.

Who’s impacted:

• Organizations that run custom solutions to provision sites and pages. This is very common for many larger and enterprise organizations
• Organizations which use 3rd party tools to create pages and site from templates. This is very common for even medium-sized organizations using tools to create project sites.
• Organizations in the middle of migrating from classic on-prem experience to Office 365 classic

What to do:

• If you have a development team (in-house or consulting), be sure to let them know to audit their customizations to find if they’re vulnerable.
• If you’re running in-house built automation from a while ago, be sure you have someone to keep an eye on those in October.
• Microsoft suggests that if your vendor is currently using any of the capabilities here (AddWebPart, AddWebPartToZone, SaveWebPart, SaveWebPart2, and GetWebPartPageConnectionInfo), you’ll need to modify the software to instead call capabilities in the LimitedWebPartManager.

I hope this helps you to prepare and mitigate your projects.