Microsoft Is Retiring Its Windows 11 Companion Apps on Dec. 16

Microsoft is retiring its Calendar, People and Files companion apps for Windows 11, roughly a year after it started installing them automatically on enterprise PCs. The apps stop working and lose support on Dec. 16, and Microsoft wants admins to pull them from managed devices before then, BleepingComputer reported.

The three taskbar apps came with Copilot built in and were meant to let users look up colleagues, find Microsoft 365 and local files and check their calendar without opening Outlook or Teams. In October 2025, Microsoft said it would begin installing them on Windows 11 enterprise devices that had the Microsoft 365 desktop apps, and by default they launched at startup. Admins could opt out of the automatic install in the Apps Admin Center.

“We are retiring the companion apps and they will cease to function and will no longer be supported after 16 December 2026. We recommend that administrators remove the apps from the devices in their tenant by that date,” Microsoft said in a Microsoft 365 message center post, quoted by gHacks. Microsoft has also stopped installing them through Microsoft 365 Apps updates.

What admins need to do

Microsoft’s retirement guidance lays out a short checklist:

• Stop every deployment method that can install the apps, including Intune and other software-distribution tools.
• Remove installer links and deployment instructions from internal catalogs and docs.
• Uninstall the apps from managed devices and monitor until they no longer show up in reporting.
• Tell users on unmanaged devices to remove them under Settings > Apps > Installed apps by searching for “Microsoft 365 companions.” Uninstalling one removes all three.

No data goes away. Files, calendar events and contacts live in Microsoft 365, not in the apps, and Microsoft points users to Outlook and Teams for calendar and people lookups, and to Windows Search, File Explorer, OneDrive, SharePoint and Copilot for files.

In the same round of admin notices, Microsoft reminded organizations to move Entra ID users to phishing-resistant sign-in methods such as passkeys or FIDO2 keys ahead of retiring SMS as a first sign-in factor starting in February 2027.