First Release - Doesn't apply to OneDrive?

Brass Contributor

Hello,

 

We recently have seen quite a few changes go through in our tenant specific to the OneDrive web user interface that were never put through the proper channels as far as making changes in Office 365 typically go.

 

Sharing files

When clicking on Share in OneDrive it used to give three options: Share, Get a link, Shared with. Now it is just a single share box.

 

Browsing to Groups

Browsing to Office 365 groups in the left navigation used to bring you to that group's document library. Now the Office 365 groups navigation appears to show SharePoint sites in addition to groups and clicking on them keeps you in OneDrive but shows the contents of the main document library of the site you visited, with a little Go to site up in the top right corner that will take you to the SharePoint site.

 

Both of these changes are not super annoying on their own (although I may personally dislike both of these changes), the most annoying thing about these changes was that the typical change process was not followed.

 

We are used to changes being rolled out to first release users first. We are used to seeing notifications in the admin message center about upcoming changes. Neither of these changes were announced and both of them were pushed to both first release and production at the same time.

 

We cannot handle change when it is run in this way. We need to have some sort of warning system. The change process should be followed.

 

Thank you.... rant over.

7 Replies

Icing on the cake.... just noticed the feedback icon is missing from the new UI... really? really?

I don't know about these specific changes, how they might relate to a roadmap item for example, but there remains an element of unpredictability with Office 365 change management.  Not much of a consolation I know but despite best efforts, sometimes things come out of the blue still!  It has got a lot better, though.  Hopefully, someone can chip in with some particulars and whether this was unexpected. 

 

I can tell you that First Release also applies to OneDrive and the changes you have just described were first in First Release...in particular the new sharing dialog that is intended to simplify how we share files in OneDrive. In regards of the second change, I think is also correct bearing in mind the separation between Site Groups and sites in general is disappearing

I can confirm that these changes were not visible to our first release users. A few days ago, they went live for all our users at once.

I don't know for sure if this is the case, but it is important to know that many changes in Office 365 are not applicable selectively (i.e. only to some users in the tenant): in such cases the rollout is for all users or for none.

Hence, if you have only some users in First Release, and not the whole tenant, it could very well happen that some changes are rolled out to all users at once, without first being visible to FR users.

I also tested for two different tenants/domain and here are my findings

Tenant 1 - I can see these changes in SharePoint and OneDrive while sharing

Tenant 2 - I can see these changes only in SharePoint, in OneDrive it is still showing 3 sharing options

 

It seems first release is not rolled out for all the tenants, Has anyone see any MS Update or Article on this?

Hello

 

In addition to my early reply, I noticed that when you change view to classiv onedrive view, you can see all those 3 options.

 

This is strange behaviour, is it by default or intertionally it is force to work like this?

 

Ashish