What is the best way to test beta features on Teams?

[AlexB]

I have a test tenant where I try all things in preparation for deployments in production and I was hoping I could enrol the tenant into beta program or something like that to test earlier releases of Teams. I Believe some features would be server based so regardless of the client version, it would also need the server to be at the same beta version.

Is there any specific procedure to do it or request such mode to be available for a test tenant?

[#2]

Hi,

Microsoft have a TAP (Technology Adoption Program) for Microsoft Teams that you can apply to join. 

I guess that a test tenant won't qualify since they want real usage from real users.

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=v4j5cvGGr0GRqy180BHbR1UzUQTEgHVPtD9W5uih2OlUMThJ...

Qualifications:

1. Active NDA with Microsoft, not expiring in next 3 months. Please confirm with your Microsoft account team.
2. Active Microsoft Teams usage in your production tenant
3. Organization size > 50 users

Requirements:

1. IT Director/CIO level executive to sponsor ~4 hours per week of IT admins' time for Teams TAP
2. Provision up to 5 IT admins in Teams TAP ring and mobile pre-release store apps.
3. Provision your production tenant (all users in the company) in TAP users Ring.
4. Participate and sign-off minimum 2 major validations within a quarter (to continue TAP participation in the next quarter)
5. Triage incoming bugs (Report a Problem in Teams) from your users
6. Active participant in the TAP100 community
7. Respond to surveys, participate in feedback sessions

[#3]

Hi guys,

Three routes people may mention -

1.) TAP (As Linus outlined)
2.) Become an MVP - MVP’s have access to earlier rings
3.) Light up developer preview. Any organisation can do this

https://microsoft365pro.co.uk/2020/01/26/teams-real-simple-with-pictures-enabling-developer-preview/

But it can be buggy and voids SLA.

To note 1 and 2 are not really to do with supporting users as it’s to do with helping Microsoft with testing and improvements. I know this because I am involved in several TAP’s and am an MVP - features in preview iterate up constantly and on many occasions never reflect the end result. 1 and 2 are as said, NDA meaning you cannot use them for deployments in situ and have to wait until the feature is in GA. in other words, even if you are discussing an upcoming feature whilst deploying Teams this is breaking NDA.

In other words, only GA tenants should support GA rollouts whether that is via the standard desk/web/mobile clients or via VDI. A demo account via demos.microsoft.com ought to be enough to support here.

Hope that helps clarify,

Best, Chris

[#4]

2) Tell me more. Been MVP for a year still don't have access to earlier ring lol!

[#5]

@Linus Cansby it seems a fair bit of commitment then, I was hoping just a casual "let's see how it goes" scenario. Thanks for the detailed explanation, much appreciated 

[#6]

@Christopher Hoard nice blog post, very well explained. Are there features that are server-based that will not be available even when using your suggestion? It feels like we are enabling preview features on Teams client, but I wonder on the server-side if they are all supported regardless?

The idea is that I can get a few users to test those features and provide feedback before they become GA in my company as well, that way we can be more confident to train our customers when it goes GA how to use these new features.

[#7 · Accepted solution]

Dev preview doesn't really give you much for Teams features, it's more for dev's and early API's. You can't really do the scenario your looking for since Teams doesn't follow the same path as 'targeted release' etc. like SharePoint and OneDrive do. There is no option for users to be set to test features early only whole tenants, and those are limited to TAP and other special program not available for public consumption.

Wish I had a better answer but that's about all we have right now. Hopefully they come up with something in the future, but for now best we can do is watch Twitter / roadmap / Tech Community for release updates and blogs.

[#8]

@Chris Webb thanks for clarifying this :)

Yep, I guess TAP for me at this stage is out of question. Too much commitment and also risk for the customer I guess.