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We are using MS Team widely across our organization and mostly we have positive feedback. However, part of the negative feedback we get relates to trying to understand when feature updates and changes are communicated but then can take 4-6 weeks to hit our tenant and then, because we have 200K+ users in our tenant, can take weeks for the updates to hit all users. How do we effectively communicate to our user base when we can't really know when updates actually hit our users?
- Working in the cloud requires a different mindset. When we have on-premises, everything is hard-coded and it doesn't change suddenly. With the cloud, new features are coming all the time and there is no way to be fully prepared for everything. People in their free time cope well with changes in their Facebook or Instagram applications without knowing all of those updates beforehand. Employees should adopt that adaptive mindset to work as well! The IT/Comms department can then help people with providing instructions, best practices and supporting employees afterwards - not warning everyone beforehand.
- This is a problem with SaaS-based solutions, in general. To add onto what Juan Carlos suggested, I am a huge advocate for the Message Center sync with Planner/Tasks so that you have a real-time feed of changes that are impacting the platform and your tenant, allowing you to see the changes, triage them (identify which will have end user impacts, which will not), and then create a plan and communicate. Many orgs do this with a regular (weekly/monthly) communication on what is coming, what has arrived. The hard part is being consistent so people build trust in the process.
- I can totally relate to this and I feel like "coming soon" fatigue is a real thing... Here's a useful blog from Microsoft that sheds a little light on *how* updates roll out: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-release-processes-why-do-i-not-see-a-feature-but/ba-p/2110426
- There are few ways to stay on top of the changes and feature releases in your tenant. In large organization such as yours, you should typically have different employees responsible for different services within M365. With that in mind, I suggest the following: 1. Have each service leader follow all the updates in the message center 2. Follow the Microsoft's roadmap: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters= 3. Follow the blogs section in this tech Community 4. Follow Microsoft's Product Group leaders and community members on Twitter to get the last from them At the end of the day, we will need to follow multiple channels to stay on top of the changes and decide how we want to rollout these changes to our organization.
- It is also worth looking at what release ring users are on, some maybe on target and some on standard. Another thing to check is if some people are using Teams in preview mode - https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/get-early-access-to-new-teams-features-a6e387fe-1cad-4f90-ad78-1a311c77b36d
- Hi Paul, just a heads-up that Teams isn't included in the standard or targeted release settings. But the ring certainly matters :) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/manage/release-options-in-office-365?view=o365-worldwide
- My recommendation here is to take advantage of the different out of the box tools provided by Microsoft to introduce what it's coming such as: 1) The Message Center that is not an IT only tool 2) Microsoft 365 Roadmap 3) Microsoft Mechanics Videos 4) Many blogs written by MVP fellows
- Unfortunately, this doesn't help with the timing. And this can have some very serious negative impacts to our organization. For example, we've recently seen the increase participation for Teams Meetings but this took a long time for all of our users to have this applied to their account. We had an executive book a meeting with more than 350 users and we saw significant numbers of people not able to participate because the meeting organizer didn't have the feature on their account.
- Ok, thanks. It's not really about when it hits our tenant but when it trickles down to the users. That can take weeks and there's no way to report or get access to see what features have been applied to what users. But thanks all.
