Important: Test Base for Microsoft 365 will transition to end-of-life (EOL) on May 31, 2024. We're committed to working closely with Test Base customers to provide support and guidance to make the transition as smooth as possible. If you have any questions or concerns, or need assistance, please submit a support request. |
Today we are proud to announce that Test Base is moving from public preview to general availability. We are announcing a set of new capabilities that make it even easier to validate your applications against Windows client and server operating system updates in a Microsoft managed test environment. You can sign up for Test Base today.
Since we announced public preview in July, hundreds of organizations spanning different industry segments and regions have piloted the service and taken advantage of the simplicity of validating the applications against Windows updates. . The service is available for software vendors to validate their apps as well as IT professionals to validate their line-of-business (LOB) applications through an integration with Microsoft Intune.
What is Test Base for Microsoft 365?
Microsoft is committed to ensuring your applications work on the latest versions of our software. Our compatibility promise states that apps that worked on Windows 7/8.x will work on Windows 10. However, customers continue to use newer processes such as ring-based testing and flighting strategies to help IT pros pilot devices against upcoming builds of Windows and Office, while limiting exposure to many end users. Test Base is another flagship offering to strengthen the compatibility promise by enabling validation of business critical apps against Windows updates in a Microsoft managed environment.
Test Base for Microsoft 365 is an Azure service that facilitates data-driven testing of applications and enables you to take advantage of intelligent testing from anywhere in the world. Test Base helps you understand your application’s ability to continue working even as platform dependencies such as the latest Windows updates change. It helps you test your applications without the hassle, time commitment, and expenditure of setting up and maintaining complex test environments. Additionally, it enables you to automatically test compatibility against security and feature updates for Windows on secure virtual machines (VMs) and get access to world-class intelligence for your applications.
Backed by the power of data and the cloud, the service enables app developers and IT professionals to take advantage of a managed test environment to test your business-critical applications against the latest Windows updates.
What’s new
We are constantly innovating and adding capabilities based on customer feedback. Here’s a quick summary of new features in GA:
Extensible SDK for customization
Automation is a key aspect of DevOps and agile development. If you are looking to manage Test Base for Microsoft 365 resources, get test results programmatically, and integrate them with your CI tools, Test Base has now released an SDK that contains REST APIs and Python code snippets!
These APIs/SDK enable IT professionals and app developers to:
- Manage Test Base accounts, including create, update, and offboard.
- Manage application packages, including create, update, delete, and download package.
- Get the test summary, detailed test results, and analysis results. The analysis result includes CPU regression,, CPU utilization, memory regression, and memory utilization.
- Download test results and test execution video recording.
We will continue to invest in enriching the SDK over time to help organizations integrate Test Base into their existing validation workflows.
Support for Windows Server 2022
Test Base can help you validate your apps and workloads against Windows Server 2022. So, if you are a software vendor or test engineer looking to confirm the compatibility of your applications with upcoming security update releases for Windows Server 2022 or its Server Core version, simply upload your application to our Azure cloud test environment and start testing today!
Test Failure email notification
Since our previous release, users can soon opt in to receive emails post package verification. This feature keeps users informed of the status of their uploaded or edited package without having to stay on or logging in to the portal.
From today in addition to the package verification notification, you can now opt in to receive an email if your package fails when tested against a new Windows Build, feature update or security update.
You can opt in to receive this notification by clicking on the Email notification menu on the left-hand menu bar. On the page, select Test failures from the dropdown of notifications. We are working on adding more notification events to the list.
What’s next for Test Base for Microsoft 365?
General availability of Test Base is just the beginning. We’ll continue to rapidly innovate and invest in application validation. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming months. In the meantime, learn more on our product page. There, you’ll find QuickStart guides to creating your Test Base account, uploading applications to test and understand how to interpret the data. We are actively engaging with developers and IT Pros now to add more value and help solve additional use cases. Visit our website to signup or to get in touch with us directly.