Office 365 gives you the latest updates and features as early as possible so you can continue doing your job productively. For Office 365 services, updates are run in the background as soon as they b...
Updated Feb 10, 2023
Version 7.0
Blog Post
New Office 365 Roadmap page is useless. In the past it was possible to filter out only last months changes, so i was checking it every month to see a few upcoming or released changes. Can't do this now. I'm not going to remember what entries out of thousand or so i have already seen. I have tried various channels to find out why such filter was removed and whether it will come back, but was told it is by design, so i have abandoned this "resource". We live in dynamic times, you can't waste your time on unrefined resources.
How i follow the changes:
Office 365 Updates episodes in Youtube (Jim Naroski). He also posts it as an rss feed to follow easily as Office 365 channel on Youtube has a lot of stuff for beginners (maybe it needs a separate channel). Channel https://www.youtube.com/user/officevideos/videos - rss feed https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/o365guy/
I also check this feed (updates weekly) for upcoming, released changes, it has replaced the official roadmap for me https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/skywriter/
Of course, daily checking Message center (and advisories for possible issues). And recently i have followed a lot of blogs here to find out news faster and in a more detailed way and actually to be able to comment and get feedback.
Message center - well, i often get better or better timed information through blogs here. Often in message center MS reports about changes, but stays "it will be released in coming months to every one". Not very helpful. I have then to make some sort of reminder to check it daily whether it is already released? This is a very annoying and confusing part of MS updates. I want to know about changes relevant to my users and WHEN they are already relevant. But i guess with millions of clients MS can't care about every individual client, so we get what we get.
Targeted release - in my experience it creates even more confusion for admins (so i already have this feature, so my users will get it.. when??). Also, as we use a Monthly channel, i have noticed no difference between those in the Targeted release and all the rest and even been told by someone from MS (not sure if by support or maybe on TechNet or Answers) that with Monthly you can't have Targeted.
All these resource do not help with issues though. When MS decided to remove "legacy" tracking and workbook sharing in Excel it wasn't on the roadmap or mentioned anywhere. We had to learn it the hard way when after the monthly update users started to complain. Don't even start me on continuous problems with PowerView add-in in Excel. One month it just disappears and is restored with next update, one month later it breaks again and support can't give a date when it can be fixed and suggest to go back to Semi-annual. When we decided to purchase E3 licenses, we were assured that it will support PowerView, that we needed. I guess we paid so much needlessly. I have more stories about surprising "features" every month. Yeah, we could probably go with a Semi-annual route, but i guess we will then get a bunch of issues at once every half a year.
/rant mode off :)