Deprecation of the regional Discovery Service and its replacement with the global Discovery Service

This impacts exclusively public and sovereign deployments of the Discovery Service. The on-premises Discovery Service continues to be fully supported.

Microsoft is announcing the deprecation and the retirement of the regional Discovery Service. It is replaced by a single global Discovery Service accessed through the existing ‘discovery’ OData V4 RESTful endpoint. Please ensure that the administrators and the other IT professionals of your organization have the information they need to prepare for these changes.

Why change the experience?

Microsoft has developed a new global Discovery Service that caters to the same discovery scenarios, but in an improved fashion thanks to its modern software architecture. Most importantly, it provides a single place to efficiently discover business organization instances whereas the regional Discovery Service requires you to know the user’s region.

Migrating as soon as possible will allow you to fully benefit from Microsoft’s ongoing investments in the performance, reliability, and other new functionality of the enriched global Discovery Service.

How does this affect me?

Deprecation will take place on March 2, 2020, and will be followed by a planned retirement of the regional Discovery Service on March 1, 2021. Until the planned retirement, Microsoft will follow up with multiple official notices. The regional Discovery Service will no longer be available once the retirement comes into effect. All instances with versions pointing to the regional Discovery Service endpoints will need to upgrade.

What is deprecation?

Deprecation means that Microsoft will continue to provide support, security, and other critical updates to the legacy endpoints until March 1, 2021, but will not release any additional functionality beyond what has already been released.

Features of the new global Discovery Service

  • Get all the organization instances given a tenant Id
  • Get all the organization instances that a given a user Id has access to

Additionally, the global Discovery Service exposes additional properties about your business organization instances such as TenantIdPurposeLastUpdated, etc.

How to migrate to the global Discovery Service?

  1. Learn how to migrate to the new global Discovery Service endpoint here.
  2. Learn how to leverage all capabilities of the global Discovery Service here.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

 

Thank you for being a valued Microsoft customer.

 

Thank you,

Microsoft