Microsoft said today it’s retiring its GigJam collaboration tool, halting work on the service with plans to shut it down completely after two years in preview.
“After careful consideration, we’ve decided to retire the GigJam Preview on September 22, 2017,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “GigJam introduced a new way to spontaneously create unstructured workflows and the Preview delivered learnings and insights that will inform future product experiences.”
Microsoft introduced GigJam back in July 2015 at its yearly Worldwide Partner Conference. The productivity tool was designed to allow workers to pull data from around their enterprise network in order to organize projects, delegate tasks, and work collaboratively with team members on a project. Work could be broken down into discrete tasks, or “gigs,” allowing team members assigned to each task to share relevant information.
Early on, Microsoft had big hopes for GigJam, envisioning it as a way for teams to collaborate on a project, or for medical practitioners to interact with patients and their family members who lived far away. “With GigJam, a business can expect a dramatic transformation of every process where humans have the potential to exercise discretion and work with others, colleagues as well as customers,” a Microsoft blog post announcing the tool said.
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Microsoft began a private preview of GigJam two months later, expanding the preview to everyone in June 2016. The tool’s distinctive design aspired to simplify collaboration by emphasizing ephemeral interactions in a simple user interface. GigJam’s tasks had a life span of seven days, but the company said today any remaining gigs will expire on September 22.
Despite the sunsetting of GigJam, Microsoft still offers a number of other collaboration tools, including Teams, SharePoint, Flow, Coco, and Yammer, which it recently integrated into Office 365.
