Where is the best place for legitimate information?

[Deleted]

I ask this question because with the new functionality of Office 365 (i.e. Groups) and specifically Sharepoint (Modern Experiences in Team Site and Libraries) there are tons of bugs and questions where no one really knows when these solutions will be what I consider "production ready" or even available to my tenant. I continually ask questions on the forums here and get half answers or the one that I absolutely hate "be patient". Seriously, I'm supposed to sit around and wait for sometime in the  next year for some or all of my issues to be resolved? I'm supposed to actually run our IT data backbone that way? Thus...my question. Where can I go as an Office 365 customer to get REAL, SOLID answers? Is there another place to report inaccuracies other than the User Voice? Some solid answers to this would definitely be appreciated. 

[#2]

This community is a good place to provide feedback to Microsoft Teams and they are the only ones that can provide answers to you...if you don't get the expected answers here, you can also try to participate in Microsoft TAP programs where the teams are more involved. I agree there is a great room for improvement in all the new stuff being developed and released by Microsoft nowadays...but in a Cloud First model and evergreen release strategy is something that, let's say, is going to happen...Might I ask you something: why don't you stay in classic mode if you don't feel confortable with the new UI?

[#3]

Thanks for the timely input and you are right...there is a lot of room for improvement. The biggest frustration with Microsoft's Cloud First release strategy is in the perception that they seem to think this gives them the leeway to release substandard product without adequate QA. I see so many more obvious bugs in their releases under this strategy. For instance, with a modern library performing in place records management the Checked Out Icon appears instead of the Lock Icon for locked records. Doesn't this seem like basic QA? When you upload a document into a Modern library the circle is not available to the left of the document until the page is manually refreshed. Once again, basic QA. I could rattle off at least a couple of handfuls of issues like this that we still see and these libraries have been released for how long? The worse thing is I have not seen these reported anywhere else except in this forum.

How am I as a user supposed to transition to a product where I have no idea what awaits me. I transition and step on landmines left and right and that is acceptable? Who is maintaining a bug list that I can review to make the determination to move to the new feature?

As far as your question regarding the classic experience, my company can stay on the classic experience and we may just do that. The push for moving to the new experience is to actually try to compensate for inadequacies in the classic Office 365 experience. For instance, our users have a big problem with documents syncing in OneDrives and SP Team Site libraries because of the obvious problems with the Onedrive client. I would love to force them to a Web Only approach but I can't because classic libraries don't accomodate drag and drop libraries whereas the Modern ones do. I can't tell my users to upload one document at a time, recreate folder structures manually, or stop everything so that we can strategize an appropriate metadata layout for the library. The new client that we have been waiting for is finally out in preview after a year and is still having problems so I'm a little stuck there. We would also like to have people use groups more since Microsoft is really pushing them, they offer direct linking from Outlook, interface with Planner, and incorporate conversations but we can't because we need to be able to have multiple libraries in Groups. The new Groups support that but I can't turn on new Group functionality in the Classic Experience and I'm not sure I want to risk turning on the new experience and disabling it individually at the list level (Site Contents would be Modern and I can't do anything about that). There are a couple of other reasons we are looking to get away from Classic but really can't....AND we really have no single full Sharepoint solution that works. Looks like I will probably end up staying on Classic and putting a link on our user's OneDrive page to "Open in Explorer".

[#4]

@Mark Kashman or @Chris McNulty or @Dan Holme or @Christophe Fiessinger should be able provide some specific answers to these very valid questions and observations.

[#5]

I definitely would appreciate their input.

[#6]

Thanks.

UserVoice is definitely the best place to flag specific feature requests or bugs you are seeing in the product.  We are working hard to accelerate the pace of innovation and delviery to SharePoint.  We know the pace of change has been faster than previous, and we learn as much as we can from each release.

The best source of information on impending feature releases is the Office 365 Message Center.  As we discussed at Ignite in our session on Change Management (https://myignite.microsoft.com/secondscreen/39486?source=schedule) we test and QA for thousands of users before we begin the First Release process.  We may not catch everything in advance, but we also evaluate release telemetry and feedback to rapidly fix issues midflight as required.

Modern respopnsive desgin is a a significant shift in our user expereince, and we still have more coming to continue to enhance this experience.  Until you're ready, please feel comfortable with using classic mode, as we have no plans to remove it.  Thanks.

[#7]

We are familar with UserVoice and have used it to submit the bugs that we find. As I mentioned before we have no idea when issues have been corrected. Is there some mechanism in place when a uservoice entry is resolved that we are informed of the release within which it is contained?

As far as testing, I guess we can only hope to see an improvement in this area.

The messages in the Message Center lack one key component...telling me when the functionality has hit my tenant. Sending me a message telling me about an impending release over the next few weeks really does nothing more than frustrate me. I would rather be told that "Your new functionality will be released with Tenant Version XXXXXX and is scheduled to be released over the next couple of weeks". At least then I can check my tenant version and know for sure whether the functionality exists. For instance, I have been waiting for New Groups to hit my Tenant for over a month and I still don't know if the functionality is there or not. You see, I am running on the Classic Experience due to the issues with Modern so if New Groups requires the Modern Experience then how do I know if it's there? Should I change to the new Modern Experience to find out if it's there? I can't do that or my users will lose their minds with the new format. Does it require Modern? Do I have it? I have no idea!

By the way, is there any documentation anywhere that actually states what I have to do in order to utilize the New Group functionality? Is there documentation in a centralized place that provides more than a Marketing pitch on any of the new functionality? I see information about these changes fragmented all over the place and most of it was out of date the day it was written. You guys need to put some focus in this area.