Microsoft announced today that their Docs.com service will shut down on 15 December 2017.
This service should not be confused with their Docs documentation portal for their products and services as they are two distinctly different services from the Redmond company.
Docs.com began as a partnership with Facebook back in 2010 to provide an online creation and editing option for Office files. In 2015 the service underwent a redesign that to improve the sharing of documents over the web. File formats the service supported included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and Sway's.
According to the support document that was released today about the retirement of the service the features in Docs.com will be replaced by other services from the Redmond company:
"Following Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn, SlideShare has joined the Microsoft family, and represents the ideal platform for publishing your Word, PowerPoint, and PDF content with its audience of 70 million professionals, and vast content library. For custom sharing, OneDrive offers additional tools, permission settings, and security to help share and protect your data and content. With the retirement of the Docs.com service, we hope to streamline our offerings in this space and provide you with a more cohesive experience."
Microsoft has laid out the following timeline leading up to the services shutdown in December of this year:
June 9, 2017 — Creating new Docs.com accounts will no longer be supported. If you have an existing Docs.com account, you will still be able to view, edit, publish, download, and delete your existing content. If you have existing Journal and About pages, you will be able to edit them on Sway.com.
June 19, 2017 — If you are using Docs.com with a Work or School account, your Office 365 Administrator can automatically migrate all Docs.com content to OneDrive for Business on your behalf. We will update this article with specific information on this date.
August 1, 2017 — Publishing and editing content on Docs.com will no longer be supported. If you have an existing Docs.com account, you will still be able to view or download your existing content.
June 9 to December 14, 2017 — If you have an existing Docs.com account, you can sign in and choose to have your own content backed up automatically to OneDrive. As soon as your data has been transferred there, your Docs.com experience will change to read-only and links to your documents and files will redirect to the new location on OneDrive.
December 15, 2017 — The Docs.com site and all of its content will be officially discontinued. The site will no longer be accessible after this date.
Original links to Docs.com items you shared with others will stop working on 15 May 2018.
To start the migration of your files over to OneDrive just log into your Docs.com account and enable the automatic backup option.
As of 19 June 2017, Office 365 Admins can enable the automatic backup of their users content from Docs.com to the users OneDrive for Business account or the user themselves can initiate the backup as noted above.
Someone asked me about Sway this morning on social media because that services was closely tied with Docs.com but there is no indication in the support document for this shutdown to indicate Sway is going away. Those Sway presentations will likely just be stored on a users OneDrive cloud storage and shared from there now instead of Docs.com.
I also suspect file sharing from your cloud storage is going to get much easier when OneDrive Files On Demand arrive in the Fall Creators Update as that sharing along with new dialogs will be built right into the Windows 10 file system.
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