Over the weekend, Microsoft announced via email that Office Mix will be retired next May with PowerPoint in Office 365 instead gaining many of its features in place. Retirement will happen on May 1, 2018, and Microsoft is calling on users of the free PowerPoint extension to take action and save files now.
For those unfamiliar, Office Mix is a free extension to PowerPoint that makes it easy for everyone to turn your PowerPoint presentations into interactive online recordings. With the new integration with Office 365, there will no longer need to download the extension, as Microsoft will be putting the features into the Recording Tab in PowerPoint.
The company also has plans to allow users with qualifying accounts to migrate and publish recordings to Microsoft Stream, allowing for the uploading and sharing of videos across an organization. Microsoft is providing the following timeline for the retirement of Office Mix:
- October 20, 2017: If you have an existing Office Mix account, you’ll still be able to view, edit, publish, download, and delete your existing content. If you have a qualifying* Office 365 work or school account, you can sign in to migrate your mixes as videos to Microsoft Stream. If you don’t have access to an Office 365 work or school account, you can download your Mixes as PowerPoint files (.pptx), and you analytics data as Excel files (.xlsx) to save to a storage location of your choosing.
- January 1, 2018: You’ll no longer be able to sign up as a new user or download the Office Mix add-in from the website. Existing users who already have the Mix add-in installed will still be able to use it to upload, edit, view, and download their existing content.
- May 1, 2018: The Office Mix site and all its content will be officially discontinued. The site will no longer be accessible after that date. Any links to your Office Mix content that you previously shared with others will stop working after this date.
Please be aware that the Recording tab is only available for Office 365 subscribers on Windows PCs, so users with Macs may be missing out on Office Mix once it is retired. Microsoft is saying that the feature may be rolled out to other platforms “over time” so it’s best to keep tuned for more in the months ahead. For now, though, Office Mix users can check out this website for the complete details on what needs to be known ahead of retirement.
