[MUSIC]
>> Hi, I'm Susan Cockrell,
and I'm a Senior Program Manager
working on the Office Insider program.
Today, I'm going to give you an overview of
the program and then I'm going to hand it over to Dan Brown,
a Senior Technical Writer for Office Deployment,
who's going to walk you through how to deploy
the Office Insider program inside
your organization using a variety of deployment tools.
First, I wanted to explain why we think
the Office Insider program is so
important for businesses like yours these days.
As the speed of innovation increases,
we've heard that customers are looking for ways to keep
tabs on all of the changes happening within Microsoft 365.
The Office Insider Program is just one of
the many offerings that we have within
Microsoft to help you stay current.
It's the preview program for Office 365,
and it gives you early access to new features so you get to try
new experiences in the Office 365 Suite before the general public.
If you're involved in the IT department of your organization,
you're likely constantly looking for ways to improve
the adoption of Office 365 in your company.
The Office Insider Program can give you a leg up
in testing or training and change management.
It helps you know what's coming and gives you a leg up.
Last, by participating in the program,
you're sending us feedback that's very
closely paid attention to by our product teams,
because it's the first signal we get
from customers outside of Microsoft.
We take your thoughts and telemetry into careful consideration.
Now, I'm here to tell you I've worked at
many Microsoft Ignites and many Microsoft Inspires.
I've heard from thousands of customers in our booth,
and I've heard this more than once.
Come on, we're just here workerbots.
He just need someone to test everything for you,
but that's just not the case and
it's not how we think of our Office Insiders.
The truth is that we have
more than 258 million paid business users
and over 42 million consumers subscribers.
The Office Insiders are the crucial few who are outside of
Microsoft walls who play a key role in shaping Office 365.
The first way that Office Insiders
know that they're helping to shape
Office 365 is by using
the new features that we shipped in preview builds.
This gives you early access to check out what's new,
but it gives us telemetry from a wide range of users
so that we know that what we're shipping
to the masses is high quality.
Next, we do find great feedback from the thousands
of Microsoft internal users who are using the new features,
but we're not the same as our customers.
Whether it's coverage across more geographies,
different ways of using Office,
or how Office works with line of business apps,
our Insiders help us find issues and bugs that we
would miss if we only look within the walls of Microsoft.
Similarly, with scenario validation,
your organizations have different ways of working,
different add-ins, macros, and
more that we don't have within Microsoft.
You can help your organization get
ready by having a few key users,
an Insider build, and checking that they
make sense for your existing workflows.
The last reason why you'd want to be
an Insider is for your influence.
Who doesn't want to be an influencer.
Like I mentioned before,
you get to help us shape the future of Office.
Your feedback and the feedback from your organization comes
through to us marked specifically as influencer feedback.
We know that it's from our most passionate fans
and we pay close attention to this.
Now that you know why it's important to be
a part of the Office Insider Program,
I want to talk about the foundation of
the program, and that's feedback.
When you click that "Smile" on
the upper right-hand corner of your apps,
you might wonder where it goes.
Well, a key internal tool is called One Customer Voice or OCV.
It collects feedback from across a dozen different sources,
everything from the app store reviews,
to send us mail sender frowned,
to customer support, and many more.
Our product teams set up
queries to their features and look at them,
sometimes on an hourly basis after they launched their features,
because they're so excited to get
the immediate feedback from Insiders
so that they can make changes to
features before they go out to production.
I wanted to share a specific example where
Insider feedback led directly to product changes.
Last year, you might remember we launched Microsoft Search.
We gave it a prominent new home
at the top of the window of our apps.
Insiders definitely saw value,
but they also gave us feedback.
They said it's taking away real estate from their satisfier,
and things look a little bit more cluttered.
Basically, they wanted changes.
As a result, we did make changes.
We did allow Search to truncate the document title,
we collapsed it to an icon and space is limited,
and we added a setting to show the search
boxes an icon for those who prefer it that way.
Thanks to Insider feedback,
we took the first draft of
this experience and we got it ready for prime time.
Now that you have a solid example of how
Insider feedback leads directly to change,
I also wanted to make sure that you understand how
we are releasing features and where Insiders fit in.
We first roll out features to
Microsoft internal users so that we can
ensure that we're giving everything a chance to
be vetted before it goes out to the public.
Then Insiders in their Fast Channel,
or what's now called the Beta Channel for Windows,
get to see features next.
These folds go out weekly and they're
best for people who want to be the first to
explore new features first and
use the earliest builds to provide feedback.
You also have to be the person who doesn't mind a bit of risk,
because this is an unsupported build.
Just so you know, it's very easy to go back
and forth between Fast or Beta Channel,
slow in production builds,
should you find an issue and you need to
get back to your productive work day.
We find very often that IT admins are the best candidates
to be running Insider Fast or a
Beta Channel builds within their org.
The next option for being an Insider is the
slow or what we call Current Channel Preview,
if you're an Office Insider on Windows.
This one comes out monthly and it
is a supported built and it's perfect for those of
you who are in change management or the help desk who
are getting your orgs ready for
what's coming out in the current channel.
If you're in one of these roles and you're in
Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise at your company,
ask your IT admin about putting you on the Insider's lower
Current Channel Preview built so
you can see these features earlier.
Finally, we roll out to
our production channels where we move into either Current Channel,
Monthly Enterprise Channel, or Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel,
and those are fully baked and supported builts.
One final thing that's most
exciting about the Office Insider Program,
is that it runs across multiple platforms.
We're very invested in bringing the best features and experiences,
not only to Windows and Mac,
but especially to our mobile devices.
We need Insiders to tell us what features you
want to see on mobile and what's working for you.
Now, I'd like to turn it over to Dan Brown,
one of our senior technical writers
who's going to walk you through how to deploy
the Office Insider program within
your organization via three different tools:
The Office Deployment Tool,
Group Policy, and Microsoft Intune.
Dan, take it away.
>> Thanks Susan. I'm Dan Brown,
I'm a Senior Technical Writer focused on Office Deployment.
As Susan mentioned, Office Insider builds
are available on all our platforms: Windows,
Mac, iOS, and Android.
I'll be talking today mostly about the Windows platform.
Really, there's nothing special you need to do
to deploy Office Insider builds.
Whatever tools you use today to deploy Office,
you can use those exact same tools
to install and deploy Insider builds.
For instance, if you use
Configuration Manager or if you use Intune,
or if you use Group Policy or the Mac Environment,
if you deploy preferences.
We'll take a look at some Windows examples in a minute,
but all the details are available on
the Office Insider Pages
in the URL that you see at the bottom of the screen.
Before we do some demos,
a couple things to keep in mind.
Insider builds are specific to the device,
not to the user.
If you have multiple devices.
You could have one device that's using Current Channel Preview,
you could have a different device configured to use Beta Channel.
If you have Office Project and Visio on the same device,
they all need to be using the same Insider build.
You can't have Visio using Beta Channel and having
Project use Current Channel Preview on the same device.
To make your life much easier,
we recommend that you configure
Office to get updates directly from the Internet.
Insider builds come out on a regular basis,
sometimes weekly, so that you don't have
to remember when those builds are coming out.
Just set Office to go ahead and
check the Internet and it will automatically
see that there's a new build available and
download it and install it for you in the background.
Let's take a look at some of
the different tools that are available to you.
The Office Deployment Tool,
sometimes referred to as the ODT,
is a command line tool that's free to
download from the Microsoft Download Center.
The ODT is actually a file called setup.exe.
Then you use that setup.exe file with
an XML file that you've configured
and here are some examples of those XML files.
That XML file basically tells this ODT what to install.
In this case, a 64-bit version of
Office and using the current channel preview.
This case, here's an example with Beta channel.
You can create these XML files by hand.
Although we recommend that you use
a tool called the Office Customization Tool,
which is also free.
This gives you a GUI Interface where you
can go ahead and make your choices,
and here are your drop-down,
here's a choice for instance,
for current channel preview.
You can make all your other deployment choices
like what languages you want deployed.
Then you click on "Export" and it
automatically creates the XML file for you.
Reason we recommend this is it helps prevent mistakes or typos.
Then once you have your XML file,
your setup file, you can copy it
over to machine or you can deploy it through a script.
Essentially, it's a simple command line where
you say setup/ configure,
and then give the name of the XML file that you want to use.
We're not going to go any further here with this demo
because then I will go ahead and do the install,
it will just take way too long.
That should give you a basic idea of what you
can do with the Office Deployment Tool.
Second example I want to show you is using Group Policy.
If you're already using Group Policy in your environment,
you're probably familiar with the administrative template files.
Here I've opened up one of the tools
we can use to configure those,
and we have two choices when we're using Group Policy.
The first policy is a computer policy.
It's here under Updates,
it's called Update Channel.
I can choose Enabled and from the drop-down,
you see here a choice for a Current Channel Preview,
you also see a choice for Beta Channel.
You can go ahead and select the channel,
go ahead and configure the rest of your policies,
and then push those policies out to devices.
The other choice you have with Group Policy
related to the Office Insider program is
the ability to give people the option
to choose their Insider build choice.
Now this could be handy for application developers, IT staff,
change management staff, training staff that might
need to be going back and forth between different builds.
This way you can have them self-select what build they want.
In this case, I'm going
to open up here and then bury it under miscellaneous.
You don't have to remember this,
all of this is documented on the Office Insider site.
You'll see here it says show the option for Office Insider.
In this case, I'm going to enable it and click "Okay".
What happens here is if you go to File Account,
for instance in Words, you see here a choice
for update options about Word.
What this is going to do, this policy setting,
is going to add a little tile here that says Office Insider.
I'm going to do a little bit of
admin hocus pocus to get this policy to apply.
I'll just take a few seconds.
You'll now see a choice here for Office Insider.
Tells me what channel I'm currently on and I can change
to either current channel, preview, or Beta channel.
This is a handy thing if you want people
to self-select what Insider build they're on.
Finally, let's take a look
at the options that are available for Intune.
Within Intune, we've got two choices here,
you could deploy an app.
I can just quickly create
the app that I want to deploy Windows 10 app.
Just leave everything as is.
Then when you get to the configure app suite page,
here under Update Channel,
you'll see a choice for current channel preview.
You don't actually have a choice for Beta channel here,
but there are ways to deploy Beta channel with Intune.
Those instructions are on the Office Insider site.
You would just continue on through the process
of creating the app package and deploying it.
The other thing you could do here is for devices,
you can create a configuration profile
and I'm going to go ahead and do that for Windows 10.
I'm going to use the administrative templates profile.
Just call this Insiders,
click on "Next" and in a second it will populate.
You'll see here if I scroll down,
there's a choice for
Office 2016 machine and you'll see a choice here for updates.
Scroll down a little further,
there we go, update channel.
This is the exact same policy
setting we saw with the Group Policy.
You could do the exact same thing we
did with Group Policy just a minute ago.
These are some of the options that are available to you.
Showed you how to use the Office Deployment Tool,
showed you some possibilities with Group Policy,
also showed you some choices you have with Microsoft Intune.
As I said before,
however you deploy Office now,
you can use those same tools to deploy Insider builds.
We didn't specifically talk about Configuration Manager,
but you can use that as well.
In the software library,
there's an installation wizard that you can
go through to create the package to deploy.
You'll see some of the same choices that you saw with
the Office Customization tool where you can
choose what product you're installing,
you can choose the channel and behind the scenes,
it will download the ODT,
it will create the XML file
for you and go ahead and do the deployment.
The other thing to keep in mind is if
you've got an existing installation of
Office and you decide you
want to change to one of the Insider builds,
you can go ahead and use these processes.
You might not see it happen right away.
That's because Office checks on a regular basis for updates.
The next time Office checks for updates,
it will see that you want to switch to, for example,
Current Channel preview and it will go ahead and start
downloading those bits and
go ahead and get you over to that Insider build.
You can force that usually by either restarting
the device or when we are in file account,
you saw the choice for Update options underneath there,
there's a choice to do update now,
and that usually forces Office to go ahead and
check for updates and off you go and you get that Insider Built.
I hope that gave you some ideas of how you can go ahead and
deploy Insider Builds in your organization.
Thank you. Now, back to Susan.
>> Thanks, Dan. Thank you so much for joining us today.
If you get nothing else from this presentation,
is that we'd love for you to join us in
shaping the future of Microsoft 365.
You can find all of the instructions for deploying
the Office Insider Program at insider.office.com,
as well as the forum for signing up for
our monthly newsletter so that you can get all of
the latest information about what's being released in Office 365.
We hope that you'll join us and become an Office Insider.
Last, there's dozens of dollars and step-by-step videos
available to help you stay
current and keep your organization prepared.
To access these and more,
visit aka.ms/microsoftignite2020/office, we'll see you there.
[MUSIC]