Safeguarding Legacy Brand Assets Ahead of Microsoft Publisher’s End of Life

Background and Challenge

Microsoft announced that Publisher, its desktop publishing application, would reach End of Life — the point at which software stops being supported and, in time, stops working altogether. For many organisations that is a minor inconvenience. For our client it was a genuine operational risk. Over many years, teams had produced and stored a large number of brand, design and educational documents in Publisher’s native .pub format. Once the application was gone, those files would be stranded: there would be no straightforward way to open, edit or even view them, and decades of digital brand assets and intellectual property could effectively be locked away for good.

The fix, in principle, was simple — convert the .pub files into PDFs, a universal format that almost any device can open without special software. The difficulty was finding them. The client’s assets were spread across numerous SharePoint Online sites (SharePoint being the Microsoft platform organisations use to store and share documents), often buried in deeply nested folders built up over years of use. With files scattered right across the cloud tenant, locating each one by hand would have meant working methodically through every site and every folder — an enormous, resource-draining task with a real chance of missing files along the way. And with the retirement deadline fixed, it was a job that could not be allowed to drag on.

Our Solution

Manual searching was never going to be reliable or fast enough, so Sound Networks built a custom automation strategy that removed the guesswork — and the human error that comes with it. At the heart of it was a custom built PowerShell script that trawled the client’s entire SharePoint environment automatically. Rather than relying on someone to remember which sites and folders to check, the script worked systematically through the whole tenant, auditing every site collection in turn.

Within each site, it inspected every document library and worked its way recursively through the folder structure — following each folder down into the ones nested inside it, however deep they went — filtering specifically for files with the .pub extension. Nothing was skipped, and nothing depended on prior knowledge of where files had been saved. For every Publisher file it found, the script captured the details that mattered: the file’s location (its URL), its name, the folder path it sat within, and the date it was last modified. All of this was exported into a single, clean spreadsheet — turning what had been an invisible, scattered collection of files into one centralised registry the client could read at a glance.

Summary

Microsoft’s decision to retire Publisher turned a large, long-standing archive of .pub files into a ticking clock for our client. By building a custom script to audit their entire SharePoint environment, Sound Networks removed the need for slow, error-prone manual searching and delivered something far more useful than a simple list: a complete, accurate map of every legacy Publisher file across the tenant, produced in hours and with no disruption to the working day. With that map in hand, the client could move straight on to converting the files into a format built to last — comfortably ahead of the deadline — protecting decades of brand assets and intellectual property that might otherwise have been lost.