Wednesday, January 28, 2015

SharePoint Online Public Facing winners announced: GoDaddy and WIX.com–with more to come

In December 2014 Microsoft announced the demise of their public facing web feature in Office 365 – a surprise for some, not so much from others. But that’s now history.

Screen shot of new subscriptions without the SharePoint Online Public Website feature

Microsoft has now announced the partners whom you can contact to get your public facing site up and running. GoDaddy and WIX.com! Hoorah!

And to be clear. This is a partnership and no real integration. There will be links within your SPO portal to direct you over to the external partners pages for setting up a new public facing portal. Which means you have to author and build your public facing site on these other platforms. Any integration with Office 365 has to come on your part for now, unless they roll out more features later. I would love to do cross site publishing, authoring in Office 365 and consuming that via search over to the publishing portal.

Time will tell if this idea is fiction or reality……

So  as of March 9th 2015 new Office 365 customers have to head over to the new partners, while existing can continue to use their public facing SPO site for at least two more years.

Check out the support page at Information about changes to the SharePoint Online Public Website and the SharePoint Online Public Website Feature Partner FAQ for more information.