Again in March 2024, Microsoft started pushing the New Groups app through an automated replace over the traditional model of the app. Later in the identical yr, in Could, the corporate penned a prolonged put up detailing all of the variations between the 2 apps. You could find it in our devoted piece right here.

Assist for Basic Groups led to October 2024, and the supply of the app will even finish quickly on July 1, 2025. As such, the corporate right now shared that it’s eradicating a characteristic on the Microsoft 365 Admin Heart portal. The change has been labelled a “Main change” as it’s retiring the choice to open a file in Basic Groups. It doesn’t say, nonetheless, why it’s eradicating it.

Microsoft has assured, although, that this feature will stay within the new Groups. It writes:

We are going to retire the choice to open a file in traditional Microsoft Groups beginning April 15, 2025, and ending April 30, 2025. As an alternative, we suggest opening the file within the acceptable app (Microsoft Phrase, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft PowerPoint) within the desktop or net, the place we are going to proceed to take a position our improvement sources. This retirement is to handle sure safety vulnerabilities that surfaced just lately with traditional Groups. NOTE: This retirement won’t have an effect on file open choices for the brand new model of Microsoft Groups.

This message applies to traditional Groups for Home windows desktop, traditional Groups for Mac desktop, and traditional Groups for the online.

The corporate provides that this variation started rolling out a couple of days again on the fifteenth and can proceed until April 30, 2025. It is going to be deployed routinely, and that no admin motion is required. Nevertheless, it does encourage the directors to inform customers about this ongoing change. When you’ve got entry to the Microsoft 365 Admin Heart portal, you may view the message beneath ID MC1058266.