I am proud to announce the General Availability of the Microsoft 365 Apps Servicing profiles to help IT professionals reduce the management burden of updating apps monthly. With Servicing profiles, you can automate your monthly update rollouts while maintaining control. We encourage you to try it out for yourself with a small set of devices first (our ‘start small feature’) to see how you can increase your update compliance and reduce your overall management workload.
Proven to help reduce admin workload and increase update compliance
Based on an internal Microsoft study, organizations that used Servicing profiles were able to update 93% of devices during each month. In contrast, those who used legacy management tools were only able to update 67% of their devices during the same period.
In the same study, less than 1% of deployment errors were reported when using Servicing profiles. That’s because we built a new agent-less model, a control plane that is built into Click-to-Run thereby, vastly improving reliability, eliminating agent related errors, and improving admin focus on deployment related issues. In these cases, we were able to see 1% of errors due to the Servicing profile’s self-healing capabilities when common deployment errors are detected. With a lower number of updated errors, admins can now regain time back to focus on their other core priorities. The study revealed that participants regained more than 6 hours per week
You asked and we delivered
Our team has spent countless hours squashing bugs and addressing your top requests to ensure that Servicing profiles meets the rigorous needs of global IT organizations.
By popular demand, we have added the ability to use Azure AD groups to define devices to be added into the Servicing profiles. This is a great way to try out the service or ring-fence a section of your organization that you want to have automatically serviced.
Don’t just take our word for it
Today, we are happy to say that millions of apps across thousands of organizations are taking advantage of the automation and control which Servicing profiles provides. One such organization, Avanade, showcases their journey to delivering an up-to-date experience for all their Microsoft 365 apps to their users. You can read the case study here.
If you are not yet familiar with how Servicing profiles can help reduce TCO of the overall management of Microsoft 365 Apps monthly updates, we invite you to watch the videos below.
How to easily setup your Servicing profile
Take control of your automation with Servicing profile
What’s next?
The journey doesn’t end here. We are hard at work building features that you have requested. Coming soon, we will release the ability to rollback apps to a previous build when issues have been reported. This will give IT organizations the control and safety nets necessary to reduce end-user downtime. In addition, we will enable wave customization, where you can define which groups of devices should go first and last. Stay tuned for upcoming announcements when these capabilities will be available within your tenant.
For more information
For more information on how to active Servicing profiles within your organizations view our documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/admincenter/servicing-profile.
We want to hear from you
Tell us how you are using Servicing profiles within your organization or send us an idea for a new feature at the Tech Community forums.
Unit next time, keep on Deploying!
and learn about best practices directly from the product teams.