In a traditional IT model, before cloud services came along, change control was something that many organizations relied on quite heavily. Any change to IT systems that could impact end users, whether it was regular maintenance or the roll out of a new product or feature, went through a rigorous process involving many stakeholders, project managers, change managers, and communications people. Nothing happened without a high level of scrutiny and a carefully worded email communication to the user population.
Then the cloud arrived, and organizations embraced services like Office 365 for a variety of reasons. Migration projects got underway, and stakeholders rejoiced at the cost savings, or simpler administration, or better security, or whatever benefits they sought from their adoption of cloud services.
Then one day, users get an email like this.
Or instead of a MyAnalytics email, a Clutter folder appears in mailboxes and messages are delivered there instead of the inbox. Or the UI for the OneDrive sharing experience changes.
For organizations that are used to that strict change control process, the reaction is often…
We didn’t approve this!
Change control certainly has value. An email like the MyAnalytics notification above can create a burden for support staff, particularly the help desk staff at the front line of most IT support hierarchies. What is this email? Is it legitimate? Do I need to do anything? Can my boss spy on me? I don’t want this! How do I turn it off?
Now, Microsoft does have a problem with rolling out changes without notification, such as the change to Exchange Online license removal behavior, or the roll out of Clutter initially without any administrative controls. But for the most part, change is communicated well and customers are provided with controls to manage those changes. The MyAnalytics notification above, as an example, was:
- Included on the Office 365 roadmap
- Communicated for my specific tenant through the Office 365 Message Center
- Configurable by administrators
So, I don’t have any excuse for not knowing about that change. The problem for some of us, is that the roadmap and Message Center don’t communicate with us in the way we’d prefer, which is into our inboxes. Instead, both are sources of information that you need to actively visit to read.
The roadmap itself can be confusing to navigate through, particularly when you’re trying to track the status of a specific item or find new items. Microsoft announced that the roadmap is going to be changing soon, which might improve the situation. There’s also the unofficial roadmap watch website, which has an RSS feed you can subscribe to.
Visiting the Office 365 Admin Portal is not a daily habit of mine, and many admins tell me the same thing. They spend more time in the workload-specific admin portals, or have automated everything to the point where they almost never need to visit the main portal. One of my long-standing gripes with the Message Center is the lack of email notifications, to the point where I have written a PowerShell script that checks my Message Center daily and emails me with any new items.
I’m hoping to tidy up the report and release the script publicly soon, but it looks like Microsoft might beat me to it as I’ve seen an example of a new weekly digest email sent by the Message Center (although it’s not happening for my tenants yet).
Although the roadmap and Message Center will tell you about new features that are coming and any actions you need to take beforehand, they won’t tell you exactly when the feature will arrive in your tenant. Take Focused Inbox as an example. Message Center lets me know that it will be rolling out sometime between October 2016 and April 2017.
Microsoft rolls out these new features to First Release customers first, which are customers that have specifically opted in to receiving new features earlier than other customers. It’s a great way to get a head start on seeing new features in action, so that you can prepare for the roll out to your end users. Some customers even maintain a separate First Release tenant for testing purposes, and then also enable First Release for a subset of the users in their production tenant.
With all of this information readily available, and assuming Microsoft holds up their end of the deal and doesn’t push out more unannounced changes, Office 365 customers are pretty well equipped to deal with change. Assuming of course that the customer is willing to accept change and let Microsoft carry them along on the Office 365 journey. In any discussion of cloud services and change control I always think back to one organization I worked for that was very strict about how changes were managed. They’d recently adopted a cloud-based mobile device management service, and the provider had notified them of upcoming datacenter maintenance that would impact the service for a short period. This caused quite a stir because insufficient notice had been provided for the normal change management cycle, therefore we didn’t approve this! But it was going to happen anyway, such is life in the cloud.
If you’re struggling with change in Office 365 then I recommend you make the roadmap and Message Center a regular part of your day, and review your First Release configuration. You can also subscribe to the Practical 365 newsletter to receive free tips and tutorials, and check out Office 365 for IT Pros, which is regularly updated with changes and new features as they’re released.
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