Community observed change

[Darrell Webster]

Hi All. We have a few official sources now for information about changes in Microsoft 365.
Announcements at conferences > Product Blogs in the Tech Community > Roadmap > Message Center.
But changes still slip through without prior notification. Some with minimal warning. Some don't appear in the Roadmap. Some have a mid to high impact on organisations.

Community-driven sources of observed changes are still highly valuable. They are unfiltered, calling it as they experience it. When there's a popular following of a source, followers add the "me too" effect and validate the observed change.

What are your favourite and reliable sources for hearing and sharing observed changes in Microsoft 365? How do you monitor your source so it's not burdensome to alert and aware?

EDIT: Inspired by @Chris Webb and a bit of thinking out loud, I suggest as a community we standardise on using a single hashtag on all social channels to share observed changes. Then we can all contribute. We might even get Microsoft to standardise on it. 

Reply with your suggestions, or existing hashtags you already follow that we might all standardise on and amplify. e.g.

• #M365Change
• #M365Alert
• #M365PSA

Cast your vote on the Twitter poll and add your opinion to the conversation thread. 

It’s time the #Microsoft365 technical community used a standard hashtag to share when they observe changes and outages. Here's the 3 hashtags you suggested.
Cast your vote for the hashtag you would use. Watch the back story video in the reply below. #RE365

— Darrell as a Service :bellhop_bell: (@DarrellaaS) August 16, 2019

[#2]

I usually get mine either from the multiple MVP's and community folks on Twitter, or by checking in on my RSS feeds for posts here on the community threads for each product :).

[#3]

I use RSS feeds for the different product group blogs here too. Do you find some updates are mentioned in blogs but not in the Message Center?
You follow MVPs who share their observations. I think we should start up a hashtag for this purpose, so we can follow just update / change related posts. I’ll edit my first post and suggest as a community, we standardise a hashtag that we can all use, whoever we are.

[#4]

Never cared much about Twitter, so I crawl these boards instead. Of course, the old Yammer network was quite more useful in this regard, but life goes on.

[#5]

I meant rss for posts in the community. Not just the blogs is where some folks will find things as they activate people don’t notice and post about them. I do follow the blogs too.

[#6]

I understand now. Which RSS feeds do you find most useful in this community?
Are some too busy/noisy to be useful?

[#7]

Do you use a tool crawl the boards? Or just use features in the community platform? What boards do you find most useful?

[#8]

Well I answer and Learn too. It’s def noisy but not over the top. Let’s you usually keep up with bugs too cause you’ll start seeing posts coming in for same things.

I just have rss setup for the main products I’m proficient at. SharePoint / onedrive / Teams / planner / flow / PA / exchange / office 365 maybe a few other stragglers.

[#9]

I utilize Feedly which rolls them all up into a single feed. And I just go read it when I can and respond there. Much more efficient.

[#10]

And I’ll subscribe to posts I don’t know or want to learn / see what happens etc.

[#11]

I'm a Feedly fan too. I have the RSS feeds to the products I work with, grouped in Feedly and check regularly.

[#12]

I'll vote no to all the above primarily because I'm not, and never will be, a Twitter user. I get my info by perusing the large number of news sources that Microsoft has via blogs or the multitude of forums. It'd just be nice if there was ONE place at Microsoft that has ALL announcements filterable by product line.

[#13]

@Cary Siemers, hashtags don't need to be just for Twitter. Once we land on something to use across the social platforms, it could be used on LinkedIn, even Instragram or Snapchat. 

I hear you when you say you just want one place to find out about change and announcements. 

I think that's supposed to be the Message Center, but it doesn't list everything.

The suggestion for using social a standard hashtag is to create conversation around an observation, a change, an outage. But I realise that some will just want to read about it and take action, not talk about it. 

I see a need for different formats to advise of change:

Live - Events and social.

Long form detail - blog posts

Long term plan - the roadmap

Specific to your org - Message Center

Quantifiable feedback - UserVoice. 

Discussion - Social, the Tech Community and comments on content. 

[#14]

Edit: Sorry this runs together but this forum's editor refuses to leave in the paragraphs I create. Except for an unused LinkedIn profile, I do realize I'm likely 1 of 10 people on the planet who has no interest in so called social media and will never embrace those kinds of products so If news is disseminated by Microsoft via those channels I won't receive it. Once upon a time one could go to a company's "news releases" section and get a wealth of information of upcoming products but now mega-corporations, like Microsoft, have so many divisions, products, and departments that want their own special page of information it becomes very hard for me to learn what's new in Microsoft products. What I would advocate would be a single source of news. That could easily aggregate all the divergent "special pages" that products heads want into one location. It is a pipe dream, but it is something I wish would happen. It is quite annoying to have to spend so much time clicking around to all the different Microsoft product/department pages to find out what is going on. What's even a bigger issue is we are a GCC tenant and finding information that is focused on the slowly released products for us is well annoying. Luckily I hope to get out of the tech field in about 5 years so it won't matter, but until then I dream . . . Thanks for the topic.