Personally I am not happy with this decision. The permissions required for the new feed in the Modern experience is not acceptable for most organisations, giving design access to a page just so you can post items back and forwards. Teams does not integrate well with an intranet and a lot of organisations do not wish to implement Yammer as it is taking people to multiple applications. So Microsoft are taking away a very useful and often used master feature of SharePoint and replacing it with things that just do not work the way organisations wish them too. The New sites (new team site and communication site) leave a lot to be desired around permissions and functions so cannot yet be used. People please vote up keeping the new feed working as it is heavily used and vital. The number of implementations out there using it that now need serious planning and training is just way too much to deal with.

It seems to me that once again Microsoft are making changes for no good reason - just pushing customers towards an alternative that customers neither want nor need for company political reasons. The audacity and incredible short notice is breath taking.

Thanks Bill. 

Will this impact Discussions? I know that once we switch to the modern SharePoint, the Discussions web part is no longer available. Thanks in advance for your response.

What are the changes of getting support for two yammer networks in an EDU tenant? One for staff and one for students?

We currently use the newsfeed for students and yammer for staff.

John Wynne Thank you for your feedback, it is greatly appreciated.  Deprecating functionality on-premises or in the cloud is not a decision we take lightly and your feedback goes a long way to ensuring we're doing so in the best way possible with the right communications.  A Message Center post accompanies this information and should be reaching tenants worldwide within the next 24 hours.  On the deprecation itself, for existing tenants the core change will be making read-only the public feed capability in the product as a legacy artifact of native SharePoint social capabilities.  Site feeds will not be impacted through this change.  We'll also be working on helping to rationalize this change through guidance that will help compare the capabilities designed to replace this functionality now and through May.  Please let me know if you have any questions.

Hi Bill, 

I appreciate the care you’ve taken writing this post.

There is a big decision here for those who have not deployed Yammer and for larger organisations not a trivial one. I accept some safeguarding has been put in place for existing tenants. A couple of points though: your post reads as if the change can be as early as 1st June which is quite a short period from today, April. Change like this will need to be in the Message Center too as a clear deprecation. Secondly, you *may* have further improvements for News and Yammer integration around the SharePoint Conference announcements. If any of those ease the decisions for customers it may be worth considering promoting those early. Thanks!

Hi Bill, *think* I get was this post's saying. Would you consider writing a bulleted version? One for a 5th grader with a short-attention-span? (For the record: I'm a fan of Yammer & appreciate how challenging it's been to seamlessly integrate into Office 365; and yes, I've been accused of possessing the attention span of a 5th grader on occasion :-) )

Thanks!