Hi, my name is Patrice Mélékian,
I'm a program manager working
on Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
I want to spend this time showing you some new features
we're developing at the Microsoft 365 Admin Center,
to give you more control over your app updates.
First, I'd like to articulate our vision
with regards to effective controls
for Microsoft 365 hub's Admin Center.
We'll talk about channel management,
the rollback and skip Office Version features,
and what's new in Office.
As an IT admin we want to empower you
to make informed IT decisions
and make you the hero for your organization.
Our new features such as general management, rollback/skip,
and Whats New in Office will help you increase your
end-user satisfaction and productivity by easily managing
devices on a monthly cadence and providing you with
effective controls and actionable insights.
We are also investigating ways
to accelerate issue resolution.
Let's talk about general management first,
update channels control how often
Microsoft 365 apps are updated when
new features, quality and security updates,
as well as bug fixes.
Customers on monthly update
cadence report higher end user satisfaction.
Therefore we made it for new tenants
and recommend you to switch to conventional.
If you need more predictability though,
you can use the Monthly Enterprise Channel,
which provides you with a more controlled and predictable
release experience the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
That said let's explore some new features we're
building to enable that experience for you.
Beginning from the left hand navigation menu
of Microsoft 365, I mean to say that you can navigate
to the Office installation options panel
through both the settings and the setup entry points.
The screen we're looking at now is the Office installation
options panel within the Microsoft 365 Admin Setup.
Here, you can select your featured updates channel
from three available options.
First you have current channel.
This is the channel we recommend for small and medium
businesses, as well as educational institutions.
We make this recommendation because your devices on current
channel will receive feature updates
as soon as they are available,
providing the most up to date features for your end users.
The next option is Monthly Enterprise Channel.
If you want fewer updates and a more predictable update
schedule, Monthly Enterprise Channel is a great alternative.
Devices on these channel receive feature updates
once a month, on the second Tuesday of the month,
because of this, your users on Monthly Enterprise Channel
enjoy frequent feature updates
while maintaining a predictable cadence.
Finally, the third option is Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel
devices on this channel
only receive feature updates twice a year.
This channel is only for select devices and I would like to
encourage you to switch to a monthly cadence,
to give you end users an optimal experience
with Microsoft 365 Office.
Now that we've explored our options, let's take the channel.
I'm going to choose Monthly Enterprise Channel,
the new monthly channel
with additional insights and controls.
Two specific controls we are introducing
here are skip and rollback.
Once you've selected Monthly Enterprise Channel
and saved your selection your devices
will begin receiving feature updates
on the second Tuesday of every month.
As a reminder, the general selection in the Admin Center
on your devices with no admin policy overrides.
For example, if you're using group policy
to choose how your users get feature updates,
the selection in Office installation options will not apply.
Next, you'll notice at the top,
there's a version management option.
Let's explore that further.
When you click on version management,
you'll notice a map appears.
Here you can select the Microsoft 365 version
you're currently on, which is version 2004,
Along with your previous and next versions.
If you click onto a version number,
you can see the release notes for that version.
You may also notice that there's an option
to skip your next update.
In the case of a holiday, that season, or other critical
times, you may want to avoid the disruption of an update.
In that case you can take advantage of this option.
Let's take a closer look at the skip feature.
When you choose to skip your upcoming
Microsoft 365 Office update you have two options.
You can stay on your current version or only get security
updates for one additional month.
Once you set your selection,
you'll receive a confirmation that your selection
will be effective within 12 hours.
Your users can continue working during a critical time
without having to worry about
this month's update disrupting their work.
Now that we are back to the map,
we can see that I've successfully skipped the next update
that was scheduled for July 14th.
If you'll change your mind,
you can cancel the skip operation at any time.
In that case, you'll get a confirmation screen
that tells you which version your devices
are going to receive, and when.
Once you save your selection
you'll receive a confirmation
that your skip has been canceled.
Now let's move on to another situation.
In this case, I noticed my users are having issues
with the latest update.
To alleviate this problem you have the option
to rollback to the Microsoft 365 Office version
my devices were previously running.
On this screen, you can choose to rollback
to your previous version.
Additionally, if your previous version is still supported,
you can also choose to get security updates
for one additional month.
Once you've saved your selection,
you'll see a confirmation that your rollback
has been scheduled and devices
will be notified within 12 hours.
Once notified, your devices will move
to the next version until next time
they check for office updates.
Similar to when you cancel your skip,
you can decide at any time to move
to the latest version available.
On the confirmation screen,
you can see your devices are going to move
from version 2003 to version 2004.
Once you set up your selection,
you'll receive a confirmation that the move to the latest
version has been scheduled.
Finally, you can combine the rollback
and skip features depending on your specific needs.
On this screen, you can also see
that Office versions are hot links.
When you click on the Office version like 2005,
you will navigate to the what's new in Office,
Which is the next feature I would like to talk about.
What's new in Office was public preview in November, 2019,
and was made broadly available in February, 2020.
Here's how to manage what's new messages
for Office updates in Microsoft Admin Center.
It's an experience that allows you to manage your end users'
experience with office feature announcement.
This feature gives you more control
about your users as experience.
Especially the feature information available
to end users in app.
The console allows you to manage new feature communication
in end user education for your organization
and take control of when your end users learn
about new features in app.
Which gives you the time to train them.
It also gives you a visibility into the content shown
to your end user for each version before the release.
You can see the list of features for office version channel,
and know which applications it applies to.
You can also learn more about the feature by clicking on it
and reading the description on the flyer pages,
and filter the result list
by release, channel, application, and status.
You can select, hide, and show single and multiple features.
This functionality is available for a subset
of Office apps on Win32 platform-
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook,
Access, Vizio, and Project.
There are multiple entry points
to manage what's new in office messages
like config.office.com, to home search bar,
to homecut and the what's new in Office
in the settings.
You can learn more about this feature
on the techcommunity.microsoft.com blog.
The code on the homepage was made publicly available
in June, 2020.
Here you have visibility into the version's readiness across
all channels and the upcoming versions
for each event channel.
Based on your feedback, we added release dates
to the Card to ensure that you have visibility
into when the version was released across all the channels.
In conclusion, we'd love to hear from you.
Please share your scenarios
and additional controls you need to
eci-engineering@maxwell.com.
And please join our customer panel at
ux.microsoft.com/panel/RDX.
Thank you for your time
and continued partnership with Microsoft.