Product lifecycle
Product lifecycle policies establish clear and predictable guidelines for expectations of product support and servicing. The policies help customers manage their support requirements. The policies also allow both product planning and information technology planning in organisations based on knowledge of the support timelines for our products.
Our products have the following support lifecycle stages:
- Pre-Release During this period as the product is gaining features breaking changes may occur and stability will improve over time.
- Mainstream Support During this period the product is stable, and we may introduce new features and fixes as necessary.
- Extended Support During this period no new features will be introduced, only critical/security problems will be addressed.
- Retired On-premises products may continue to work without support, and online services will no longer function.
ACS and SharePoint Addin Retirement
On 28th November 2023 Microsoft announced its intention to retire the following technologies:
- Azure ACS
- SharePoint Addins
From Microsoft:
Azure ACS retirement in Microsoft 365:
"Azure ACS will stop working for new tenants as of November 1st, 2024 and it will stop working for existing tenants and will be fully retired as of April 2nd, 2026. This applies to all environments including Government Clouds and Department of Defence."
SharePoint Add-In retirement in Microsoft 365:
"SharePoint Add-Ins will stop working for new tenants as of November 1st, 2024 and they will stop working for existing tenants and will be fully retired as of April 2nd, 2026. This applies to all environments including Government Clouds and Department of Defence."
Multiple Sensei products rely on these technologies and must follow the same schedule for retirement. We understand that this may pose challenges for our customers, but we are committed to providing ample time for continuity planning. In the interim, we will actively explore possible mitigations and engineering alternatives, and we will share more information in early 2024.
Frequently Asked Questions
What parts of the Reporting Hub are affected?
The two technologies being retired are Azure ACS (Access Control System) and SharePoint Add-in's. The Reporting Hub utilises SharePoint add-in technology authenticated by ACS in order to display embedded reports to end users. Once these technologies are decommissioned, this functionality will also fail.
But Microsoft has newer technologies to replace these retirements, why aren't you using them?
Although Microsoft offers newer technologies—such as SharePoint Framework as a replacement for Add-ins and Entra ID to substitute ACS—adopting these would necessitate significant new investment in the Project Online platform. The retirement of ACS and Add-Ins represents just a part of the broader wave of technology retirements affecting Project Online end-users. By April 2026, it is anticipated that additional technology retirements will further impact the platform. Consequently, even if we were to upgrade the Reporting Hub, the discontinuation of other technologies by Microsoft would adversely affect the end-user experience to such an extent that maintaining the platform's viability would become impractical.
For more information on other Microsoft deprecation announcements that affect Project Online see: