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Deleted's avatar
Deleted
Jan 07, 2019

Targeted release for particular users

I have a question around how targeted release for specific users works for Office 365 (I am not talking about client applications). I can see for certain features which are user-centric that this mak...
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ChrisWebbTech's avatar
ChrisWebbTech
MVP
Jan 07, 2019
Being on targeted release, you won't get all the changes that say a first release entire tenant would see due to some things requiring like you said entire back end changes. Sometimes from my experience as well you will get a feature but it won't work for those users because it's not all users. It may have changed recently where they do a better job of that, but tenants with select users won't get ALL the exact same features that a tenant set to that will all the time, but most of the time the Select Users will get them first.
  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Jan 07, 2019

    Thanks - I figured as much and I guess in those cases they just hold it back until ready for everyone.

     

    The reason I am after clarification is in designing a path to live for a large corporate. There was a feeling internally that we could simply assign only some users to be on targeted release and that would give us enough of a heads up to some of the changes coming. I feel that really you need at least a whole environment before prod on Standard release which is where you test and then another one before that on targeted for everyone in order to see upcoming changes across the board. 

    • Dean_Gross's avatar
      Dean_Gross
      Silver Contributor
      Jan 07, 2019
      The biggest issues I have with the Targeted Release process, is the fact that many services/apps don't use this process and many feature updates just show up and the only way to know that you have it is trial and error.

      The problem with having a separate tenant, is that there is no way to control which tenant gets an update. It is quite possible for a "Prod" tenant to get an update before a "Test" tenant.
      • Deleted's avatar
        Deleted
        Jan 07, 2019

        That's a good point actually. I wasn't aware that a fair amount of stuff might bypass targeted release...it's all a bit wild west then. If you happen to build processes, both people and code based it can take a long time to get those changed in a large corp environment.

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