In January, the SharePoint team announced that we are removing the ability to opt an entire tenancy out of modern lists. That announcement said that we would start this rollout on April 1st, 2019. This post is an update of where we are with this rollout, and when you can expect this rollout to affect your environment.
We are rolling this out in two waves: an early wave, and a late wave. Start dates for these waves are as follows:
- Early wave: Rollout will begin April 24, 2019 and conclude by the end of May.
- Late wave: Rollout will begin June 3rd, 2019 and conclude by the end of June.
Every tenant is in either the early wave or the late wave. All tenants in the early wave received the following message in the Message Center in early April:
- MC177122 Reminder: SharePoint tenant opt-out for modern lists is retiring in 2019
If you did not receive this message in your tenant, then that tenant is in the late wave. We’ll make this reminder post to the Message Center for late wave tenants towards the middle of May.
Many of you have asked for the ability to predict exactly when this change will affect your environment. Unfortunately, we are not able to do that – this change, just like our other changes, will roll out slowly over the course of an entire month. However, there is a way to take fate into your own hands. Since all this change does is remove the tenant opt out mechanism for modern lists, you can preempt our rollout cadence and make the change yourself as early as you’re ready. Simply enable modern lists in SharePoint admin center! All the change does is flip this switch on your behalf; by doing it yourself, you can control precisely when your end users will be impacted.
In our conversations with customers about this change, we’ve learned that many organizations are relying on their end users to identify the lists in their environment that need to stay classic, and opt those lists out of modern. We’ve made a small change that makes it a little bit easier for an end user to opt a whole site collection out of the modern experience. The site collection feature that opts all the lists in that site collection out of modern previously required PowerShell to activate; now it appears in the Site Collection Features UI. If need be, Site Collection Owners with no PowerShell access or abilities can find this feature on this page and activate it to keep all lists in that site collection in classic:
SharePoint Lists and Libraries experience
Activate this feature to turn off the new SharePoint list and library experience for this site collection
Many of you are crafting internal communications to let your users know this is coming. We definitely consider this a best practice for large changes like this. In these communications, linking to this new article from us can serve as an introduction to what is happening with this change, why folks should be excited and not concerned, and how they can opt some lists out if they don’t want to embrace modern yet.
