Can’t agree more here with the rest!

What is happening - this is a sad update to see, for osh there is offen I see stuff there is outdated- and I see that will keep going up then…

I have updated a lot over the time, and I even got a lot into the docs for Global Secure Access of limitations for B2B scenarios, there was stuff never documented in the “faq”/“known limitations”… 🙄

I still see one from the old old Azure AD times and almost before, screenshots and more - it’s impossible to hold up to date WITHOUT the community!

In the past it was great that the community could improve the documentation, but the problems were obvious. Sometimes valuable community Pull Requests and Issues were left open for months or even years. Now that immediate cause for frustration will disappear, but with it we will also loose accountability, transparency and the chance for actual community involvement. 

I don't like this change. But I'm not surprised.

This is disappointing news. Microsoft stood out from others in the industry by using public repositories for their documentation. I remember contributing to an Exchange PowerShell cmdlet documentation years ago and thinking it was so cool that my changes were reflected in Microsoft’s official documentation for everyone to see. I hope Microsoft reconsiders this change and what it means for the community.

This is a rather unfortunate & silly decision & whilst I really wanna leverage certain words here that are in the English Language, I will refrain from doing so to keep somewhat professional, what I say elsewhere well that's a different matter.

One of the best things that Microsoft did was open sourcing their documentation, even for closed source products like the on-premises versions of M365 Servers & fully integrating the process for making edits to individual documents available in the pages themselves. The removal of that feature was a mistake, the removal of these repositories for currently supported closed source products is also a mistake, like it has been for deleting repositories for all those out of support/deprecated products that are still deployed out there in the world.

From a historian's point of view I cannot understand why this change is happening, the only place that to me makes sense is that there is a need to free up some of the compute resources that are currently allocated for these repositories and reshuffle things after recent layoffs.

Doing this feels akin to .NET yelling out to the community "Hey we going back closed source now sorry & all the documentation is also going behind closed doors too & will need a product license to access"

That is not a suggestion either. But you get why this feels kinda like a sneaky stab in the back when we've been unfortunately stunned when someone threw a stun grenade our way.

The options for feedback just unfortunately don't meet the need for the end to end of what is a `living breathing document` which the GitHub backed repos does best. 

I mean you even still today have a Learn Pathway for becoming a Learn Documentation Contributor - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/become-learn-contributor/?source=recommendations

Honestly, as one of the many former MVP's for 7 years & a currently serving Microsoft Global Community Initiative Regional Lead (MGCI RL) I am very disappointed in seeing the demise of all of Microsoft's documentation being open source editable, with full end to end traceability as to when and why edits are being made.

I already know from the chatter on Twitter/X about this, which is how I learned about it that this decision, is not being met with "warm fuzzy feelings" in the slightest.

I hope that perhaps there will be either a rethink, or a more detailed reasoning as to why this decision was made as this post, as to be brutally honest whilst still being professionally kind, we need actual details being provided as this post lacks the detail and just adds unnecessary scare by being so light on the details.

At a minimum, we should have had some detail that covers
- How many repositories are potentially affected with a list of them & importantly who's the owner of that repo/group of repos.

• I'd recommend a public tracking system that is built and viewable on GitHub because well it would just make sense

- Additional data around the operating costs for individual repos 

• Human and compute cost
• I'd quite like this to be information that is available via repositories themselves as that information is already available somewhere even if in multiple disparate systems and hidden by "Promotional Credits" costs for any of the agent costs etc

There are estimate tools out there but we should really be able to see what the rough monthly cost of a repo is. Which I know isn't just for these repos but that info, would help people actually understand decisions like this instead of it just being a "hidden management only thing" and better brings things into the open.

But ya, I'm not a fan of this direction, at all.

John said it almost perfectly in their answer - I really just want to add, that as MVP, I also feel this is a step in the wrong direction. 

The main point John made that I want to reiterate is that quality is determined by contributions. AI alone cannot understand certain nuances. In fact, quite the opposite is true: AI uses this documentation as a source of truth. Don't create an Ouroboros of learning that feeds on itself.

Martin, I genuinely don’t understand how Microsoft can claim a continued commitment to high-quality technical content while simultaneously removing public contribution mechanisms and after laying off much of the technical writing organization.

I’ll acknowledge that some PRs were junk, and some GitHub issues were little more than support tickets in disguise. Anyone who worked in those repositories knows there was plenty of noise to sift through.

But let’s also be honest about the alternative. The documentation feedback control on Learn is effectively a black hole. Customers submit feedback and rarely know whether anyone saw it, understood it, acted on it, or simply closed it. GitHub wasn’t perfect, but it provided transparency, accountability, and a visible path from problem to resolution.

I say this as someone who spent nine and a half years as a technical writer at Microsoft, working on this content. I wasn’t an outside observer. I was one of the people creating, reviewing, and maintaining the documentation customers relied on.

The hardest documentation problems were never about generating more words. They were about answering the questions customers actually have:

• How does this change affect my existing deployment?

• What breaks when I migrate?

• Which authentication methods are impacted?

• What are the edge cases?

Those answers came from experienced writers partnering with engineering teams, challenging assumptions, finding gaps, and translating product knowledge into something customers could actually understand.

Community contributions helped close those gaps. I was one of the people who wanted to continue helping. Now public repositories are going away, the writing organization is dramatically smaller, and one of the few transparent feedback loops is disappearing.

Community contributions weren’t valuable because every contribution was good. They were valuable because the process was open.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but from where I sit, this feels less like an investment in documentation quality and more like a reduction in the people and processes that made that quality possible.