The Countdown Has Started for Restricted SharePoint Search

𝗝𝗮𝗻𝘂𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝟯𝟭, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟳. If you're using RSS (Restricted SharePoint Search) in your tenant, put that date in your calendar, as by then you need to have fixed whatever underlying data issue RSS was turned on to cover up.

Message center post MC1395311 announces the retirement of Restricted SharePoint Search. No new enablement will be supported after July 31 this year.

RSS was always supposed to be a temporary fix to data problems that might otherwise hold you up in deploying Copilot. It was a sledgehammer to crack a nut in many cases, restricting Copilot to an allowlist of SharePoint sites, and locking down search to the same. It was also the first real admin level tool Microsoft made available to address the data access issues many organizations were seeing when they started thinking about buying or using Copilot.

Since then, the picture has moved along significantly. More targeted interventions like Restricted Content Discovery (RCD) or Copilot-scoped data policies allow us to be more surgical in addressing valid concerns while still allowing Copilot and search to operate largely as designed.

Yet while RSS was designed as a temporary measure, it had no controls around it that would force this to be the case. Undoubtedly there are organizations that deployed RSS and then never circled back to address whatever it was covering up.

Now that control is here, and you have seven months to untangle yourself from RSS activation. There is no automatic on-ramp to RCD. Fail to address this by the deadline, and whatever RSS is hiding returns to your search results and into Copilot's view.

First posted on Linkedin on 06/30/2026 → View Linkedin Post Here