On today's show, we look at the latest in how you can manage changes coming to Office
365. We'll take a look at how changes are rolled out in the service. How you can be
the first to experience changes within your Office 365 tenant using first release and
extend that access to just select people. We'll also show you how you can stay up to
date with updated resources even on the go.
Microsoft Office
Office Mechanics
So I'm joined here today by Arpan Shah. This is a familiar topic with Admins but how do
you and your team really manage change in the cloud?
As we move from on-premises to cloud, what used to be multi or upgrade projects are now
continuous updates. So this basically gives admins and users the most modern experience,
it also means changing the way you manage the service.
This is a lot to digest for an admin when you think about how change management typically
works in IT. We've had Julia White on the show just a few weeks back where we actually
showed 365 plus innovations in the last year. How does that work and how do I really consume
that as an IT admin?
The way it works is, we have engineering teams to develop features. And let's say you have
thousands of engineers developing features for 365, they build them and test them amongst
themselves. That's kind of the first internal ring of testing. And then once that passes
from criteria and moves to the whole Office team, which is thousands of people, then we
roll it out to all of Microsoft which is a hundred-plus thousands of people. And once
we feel good about that and get a lot of feedback, we're ready to go. We release it externally
to first release ring that's basically people who have opted-in and say 'hey, I want the
features first'. The benefit there is Microsoft can get feedback and they're able to test
the features, see them first, bill training, and so on and so forth. Then once we feel
good about that, we roll it out worldwide
When that happens, does everybody get the change at the same time?
Not exactly. Because we have such a global footprint, we're around the world, you have
a lot of servers, you have a lot of data centers. so we start rolling out the features. And
some features can take just a few weeks for it to get rolled out globally some features
can take longer. The nice thing is that every single customer has the benefit of saying
'Hey, I want to be part of first release'. It's a feature in the tenets. Let me show
you how that works.
Okay.
Here I'm in the Admin center, and I've actually chosen the updates option on the left-hand
side. You can see over here that we have a couple options. First is standard, which is
basically in the worldwide ring I'll get it when everyone
else gets it
Right.
But we also give the option to get into first release in two ways. One is your entire org.
Let's say your a small company and you all want to be on the edge of cutting technology,
you can say give it to everyone. But what we find a lot of customers doing, large mid-size
customers, is they choose the second option. Which is brand new, we announced at Ignite,
where you can choose select people who have access to the first features. In this case,
I'll search for everyone that starts with an 'A' and Ann Wallace is someone in my IT
staff and she might be part of change management group, she might be part of the PMO. Now she
can get features first, test them out, give feedback to Microsoft and also start
building and training that she can roll out to end users.
Taking a step back, what that means is when I set the organizational setting my entire
organization, all of the people in my tenant will actually move into that first release
ring. But now this new capability allows just a few people maybe
the IT team, maybe a couple of initial testers that are really tech enthusiasts in the org,
to go into that first release ring. Only those guys. That means that you don't have to set
up trial or demo accounts for those types of things. Maybe pay for a test tenant when
you can just have those few select people into that ring.
Now this doesn't work for SharePoint, Skype for Business and Yammer yet but we'll keep
improving that feature.
We've done a lot in terms of also communicating the
changes that are coming or upcoming. Why don't you show us some of the new things that we've
done there as well. Really make sure people get a heads up for what's changing
Yeah absolutely. Over a year ago we released, Jeremy you remember, our team released the
Office 365 roadmap.
Right
A lot of people were saying 'Hey, we want to know what your shipping. We want to understand
so we can start planning.' So we listened to that feedback, and now anyone can actually
go to this public website which hangs off of success.office.com/en-us/roadmap. You can
see what's launched. Which are the features that are recently available to everyone else,
features are rolling out, like I said because of the physics, we start rolling things out
and that can take a few weeks. These are features that are rolling out right now in the service.
And just to give you an example, this is a really nice responsive UI. We give you information
here like the notification pane that's rolling out
right now. And as these features rollout we actually go ahead and share more and more
information on the roadmap and we blog about it on our blog. You could see some other categories
here in development which are features that we're currently in the kitchen that engineering
is building and we want to give people a heads up. And then there is canceled. We don't like
to put things there but we want to be very transparent so there is something that we
said we're doing and then we're postponing it or changing it that's
our way to do that. We've received really positive feedback but people
said that this was overwhelming, that there was a lot of changes.
Right
So we added a new feature here which allows you to choose only to show recently updated
features. If you're someone who looks at the roadmap every couple weeks, you
may not want to see the whole laundry list. You can choose that option and get a trim
down version.
I know we've also done a lot of work in terms of the message center and really targeting
information down to admins who need to know immediately about things happening in their
tenant.
The message center is a feature we built, again, about a year, a
an a half ago and the idea here was to have a direct communication with admins. We wanted
to make sure we were able to target communication to admins based on information that they need.
It's very tense specific which is really important. Over here you can see the message center and
you can also see that we have categories here because you want to make it very easy for
people to digest the information. In this view, I'm seeing all the messages that we've
communicated but we also have these other categories like
prevent or fix issues, which is sent pretty much automatically. Office 365 notices if
there is an issue of configuration or something that's pertaining to you. Think of it and
x-record change you may need for mail flow, we are targeted for you. Now that's very rare.
There's nothing here which is good thing. Then we have a category which is all about
planning for change. Again, targeted but here we're letting
you do things that are going to happen so you can plan for it.
Ok.
This is a really good example here. We're planning to make some changes to SharePoint
and this me change your business workflow. This may change the way your end users just
expects something to happen. We want to give sufficient time, information so you can plan
for this. The last category is 'stay informed' and stay
informed is information that is relevant if you want to learn more about what's coming.
It's more informative, again, more targeted but things like new features. For example
we just released Office for Android earlier this week, the week we are shooting, and we're
letting admins know about it.
We've also had a lot of great things in terms of making sure that you get to this information
as easily as possible on the go. Why don't you give us a what a peek at the actual admin
app for Office 365
Yeah, absolutely! Office 365 admin app is available on Windows Phone iOS and Android.
What it does is, it gives you access to information and actions on the go Really cool, really
easy, based on feedback that we got from all of you. In this particular case you can see
that I have my Contoso tenant, the same thing I was looking at earlier. I can go ahead and
manage users. So I can pick a user, let's pick Ann again who's part of first release.
I can reset her password. Super easy. As you can imagine
users forget their passwords. It happens. Now on my phone I can actually go ahead and
do it. I can also sign licenses. If I want to give her access to OneDrive for Business
for example, I could go ahead and do that.
Okay.
But let's go back to message center. Or messages, and with the new admin app we've updated it
so you also can see all the messages we just saw in the message center web experience.
Right
There's that Office for Android message right here. So I can read it on the go and we also
have some color coding for categorization based on actions that you may have to do.
Okay.
So in the web browser, I didn't point it out earlier, but there was an exclamation point.
Those are the ones that were really important, things that you should look at so you can
plan for it. Here they're just color coded in this UI.
Okay.
The last thing, while we're not specifically talking about this today, I
also want to show that we also get service health information. Because managing change
is not just about features we rolled out, but they're also about things that are unexpected.
We had this functionality before, we made it a lot better, cleaner and we've also given
the option to sign up for push alerts. So, if there's an issue in the service, you'll
get a push notification. As an admin that's really important
for you to know. So again a bunch of this was built based on your
feedback
This is all great for staying ahead of change but the other part of managing change is really
getting that information out as an admin to your end-users. So we're doing a lot there.
I think you mentioned Success Center earlier, why don't you show us what that is.
Yeah, absolutely. So this is obviously Success Center at successcenter.office.com. And this
is the one place for everything you need to deploy and use Office 365. Things like the
roadmap our hanged right off of here. But what I wanted to show you here was all the
content and assets based on best practices that we actually post here that I highly encourage
everyone to go ahead and take a look at. If I go to scenarios, we have scenarios, that
again, based on feedback, based on customer real world examples. We actually share resources
that you can go use. Things like an announcement template. Very useful.
Right.
If there's a new feature, if there something you want to go ahead an
announce, we actually share how to go do that. We also flyer templates. Some IT pros like
to post flyers in the hall way.
Posters those types of things.
Yeah old school. So we also have that. Just some great resources. Because at the end of
the day, we can ship 300 features but success for us is for users to use this. We want to
make sure all of you are super successful, not just managing change but driving
adoption.
Right. This is really good in terms of being able to communicate change. Make it as easy
as possible from an IT admin perspective. Hopefully this helps clarify how we manage
change how we communicate change in the Office 365 service but do you have any closing recommendations.
Yeah, absolutely. Number one: sign up for first release. Just go to your Admin Center,
click on left side updates, choose 'first release' and try this like users feature.
The second one is download the mobile app on the mobile platform of your choice. And
the last thing is go to success.office.com for all your deployment
usage needs.
Of course you can keep up with all the latest news on the Office blog and Mechanics on Wednesdays
and as news breaks. Thank you for watching and goodbye for now.