Post date: Feb 16, 2015 9:59:09 PM

Up until December 31, 2014, the St. Nicholas Church School website was hosted on Microsoft Office 365 (a Sharepoint Online service) here:

http://churchschool.sharepoint.com

As of January 1, 2015, a brand new St. Nicholas Church School website has been developed and operating on Google Sites here:

http://churchschool.stnickaa.org

The new website's subdomain address (churchschool.stnickaa.org) is under our parish domain address (stnickaa.org) and is more appropriate both organizationally and functionally.

Recreating the existing Church School website from Office 365 to Google Sites took a lot of work but had to happen. As described below, Microsoft is advising Office 365 customers to find alternative web-hosting services.

The good news is that Google Sites has proven to be an even better web-hosting service for our Church School website. It supports better navigation (drop-down menus) and much better posts for news and announcements (such as this one).

Microsoft confirms it is dropping Public Website feature from SharePoint Online

By Mary Jo Foley for All About Microsoft | December 19, 2014 -- 18:58 GMT (10:58 PST)

Summary:As rumors suggested, Microsoft is deprecating Public Websites from SharePoint Online and Office 365 in January 2015. Here's more on why and what happens next.

The rumors were right. Microsoft is dropping the Public Website feature from SharePoint Online as of January 2015.

New customers signing up for Office 365 as of January 2015 won't have access to Public Websites in SharePoint Online, Microsoft officials acknowledged in a new Knowledge Base support article published on December 19. Existing customers using SharePoint Online Public Website will continue to have access to this feature for a minimum of two years following the changeover date, Microsoft execs said.

Microsoft is planning to advise Office 365/SharePoint Online users who want to use Public Websites -- a feature that allowed customers to build public-facing Web sites on top of SharePoint -- to use certain third-party services that integrate directly with Office 365 for that function.