Remote Event Receivers retirement update in SharePoint Online

Microsoft aims to provide the best value to our customers through modern, optimized, secure solutions in this new world of digital transformation. As part of this change of Microsoft 365 solutions, we announced on November 27, 2023 that both the SharePoint Add-In extensibility model and the use of Azure ACS (Access Control Services) for SharePoint Online authentication needs are retired as we believe Microsoft 365 customers will benefit more from modern SharePoint extensibility models and modern authentication offered by Microsoft Entra ID. The retirement of SharePoint Remote Event Receivers is part of these announcements, but we want to address the feedback we’ve received from our partner ecosystem and offer a better transition path from Remote Event Receivers.

If you are deploying a Remote Event Receiver as part of a SharePoint Add-In or if you’re using Remote Event Receivers registered using Azure ACS as the authentication system, then these Remote Event Receivers will follow the same retirement timeline as the one communicated for SharePoint Add-Ins and Azure ACS use for SharePoint Online. The key deadlines in this case are November 1, 2024 for new tenants and April 2, 2026 for all existing tenants. If you are registering your Remote Event Receivers using an Entra application that uses the sites.selected role for getting granular access to one or more site collections, then those Remote Event Receivers will continue working until July 1st, 2027. To learn more about this approach you can read the Use remote event receivers without Azure ACS dependency article.

We also want to acknowledge the expressed need for web hook enhancements, we’re actively looking into faster web hook triggering, reducing the “renewal burden” and supporting rich notifications that limit the call backs to SharePoint. Today Remote Event Receivers support a synchronous and asynchronous model, whereas web hooks are designed to be asynchronous. We are not planning to support synchronous web hooks, we recommend partners to redesign business flows that depend on synchronous operations. More details about the planned web hook enhancements will be shared in Q2 2024.