Slow to receive new features

Bronze Contributor

I think one of my biggest pain points with Office 365 is the slowness in which a Government tenant receives updates.

For example, Sway was announced in October 2014 and Planner was announced in December 2015 and neither has shown up for my tenant.

The other day my boss saw mention of Microsoft Teams in news media and was excited and wanted to know when we would have access. I had to tell him that it can be years before our tenant receives a feature, even though we are paying for it.

 

5 Replies

I couldn't agree more. It'd be nice to have a Government-specific roadmap that might shine some light into feature availabliity in G-SKUs.

If you go to this link and search US Gov, you should be able to see the Roadmap for Government specific features

Yes, I was aware of being able to search with US Gov. 

However, just saying that Planner and Teams "will be available in Office 365 US Government Community (GCC) once it meets the compliance commitments of the offering" tells me nothing so that I can plan for it. It could be today, next week, or even a year from now. I can't plan for change for my users with that wide open timeframe.

Of course one could wonder, why aren't those "compliance commitments" delt with BEFORE a new feature is rolled out?

Well - not every government is the same - o365 isnt looking just at one specific nation or even state/sector within a nation, would be my guess and that there is probably some form of acceptance testing for government compliance that has an agreed timeline within each part.

 

Where as in the private sector there is more ability to offer a standard service and the market decides the speed / price of adoption.

 

I guess just look on it that the private sector are your testers, if things roll to government tenancies, then they've passed the test phase.

Hello all! @Stephen Brown@Rich Burdes- we're having a Gov AMA now on the community. Join here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Government-AMA/bd-p/GovernmentAMA