Microsoft announced that they will soon retire Office Mix, an add-in for PowerPoint that lets you add more interactivity and publish your content online. They also implied that features found within Office Mix will now be available in subsequent Office 365 updated versions of PowerPoint without the need to install a separate add-in.
While the add-in features of Mix may soon show up in PowerPoint, what happens to your published content? Microsoft says that this content can be migrated to their Microsoft Stream service with one click. Here’s what they say on their site:
In the coming months, you’ll also be able to publish these recordings to Microsoft Stream, which offers a simple way to upload and share videos securely across your organization to improve communication, participation, and learning.
If you’d like us to migrate your existing mixes to Microsoft Stream, please click here to visit the Office Mix migration page, sign in, and follow the prompts to automatically migrate your data. When the process finishes, your mixes will be stored on Microsoft Stream as videos. You can continue to access Office Mix until May 1, 2018.
Do note that the two Microsoft links provided above seem to loop between each other. The migration options will show up, and the looping will stop–only if you sign into your Office Mix account, and to be fair, Microsoft does say you have to sign in. What’s not said though is that even if you are signed in OneDrive or another Microsoft site, you will have to sign in again to the Mix site, even if you use the same Microsoft Account username or password.
Once you are signed in, you should see a large Migrate button. But I saw no such button. Why would that happen? That’s because the Migrate button will only show up if your Mixes are prepared for migration. Sure enough, when I visited my Uploaded Mixes page, I could see that my Mixes were still being prepared for migration, as shown in the screenshot below.
OK, here’s another caveat you should be aware of. To use Microsoft Stream, you must have an active Office 365 subscription. Additionally, you can also sign up for a Microsoft Stream subscription without any Office 365, but there’s no communication from Microsoft if non-Office 365 Stream accounts will support migration from Mix.
Here’s some more info from the Microsoft site:
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.
So what if you don’t see a Migrate button when you sign into Office Mix. There’s no need to worry now since Mix will allow you to migrate your content until May 1st, 2018.
You have until January 1st, 2018 if you want to sign up as a new Mix user or download the Office Mix add-in from the website. And if you have already signed up and installed the Mix add-in, you can upload, edit, view, and download your existing content. You can also upload and edit from within PowerPoint.
On May 1st, 2018, Office Mix will cease to exist. You must migrate or download your content before that date.
Microsoft has not provided any date when the Mix abilities will be made available natively within Office 365 versions of PowerPoint. Also, there is no information about what happens to users who use Mix in non-Office 365 versions of PowerPoint 2013 and 2016.
Do note that Office Mix is the second sharing platform after Docs.com that Microsoft is discontinuing.
They do mention that Office Mix functionality will be made available via PowerPoint improvements and Microsoft Stream, but wouldn’t it be better to provide this functionality first, and then discontinue the product, rather than do the other way around?