Updated: July 15, 2020 (October 20, 2014)

SharePoint Online Tags and Notes Abruptly Retired

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

Tags and notes have been disabled in SharePoint Online as of Oct. 2014, and organizations should archive any existing ones they want to keep by the end of 2014. Removal of tags and notes is probably part of a larger retirement process for SharePoint social features since Microsoft now recommends Yammer for social discussions and sharing. The removal probably will also affect the next version of the SharePoint Server software for on-premises use, which is likely to appear mid-2015. It illustrates that Office 365 customers cannot count on the usual 12 months’ notice before less-used features are removed.

Social Bookmarking Gone, Keywords Survive

Tags and notes, introduced in 2010, enabled individual users to create and share annotated bookmarks to content that contained keywords (tags) or text (notes). Search and some navigation features used tags and notes to help find content; for example, sites could include “tag clouds,” which list frequently used tags and enable users to click through to tagged content.

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