Microsoft (MSFT) Posts Office 365 Roadmap; Debuts New 'First Release' Program

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) group project manager Jake Zborowski posted the following to the official Office blog today:

Those of you who have been following this blog have seen dozens of great improvements that we’ve shipped to Office 365 for business services over the last 18 months. In that time I’ve had the opportunity to discuss our roadmap and release processes with customers across the globe, and two major trends have become apparent to me. First, many of you are really excited about the new update cadence, specifically the ability to consume change in small chunks, our responsiveness to your feedback, and fast access to the high value of the new services and features. And second, just as we transformed our development processes, we need to transform our communication processes regarding changes and future updates to the service. We’ve been working hard on this feedback, balancing our ability to deliver high quality timely improvements to the service with your need for information.

Get a view into the future with our new public roadmap

The most significant change we’re making is in how we communicate updates and provide a forward-looking view of our service plans. We’ve learned a lot from our Yammer team on how customers expect communication in a fast-paced, services world, and we got great feedback from customers like you at the SharePoint and MEC conferences on our transparency for future investments in our business services. Building on this, we decided to take the next step and communicate with you in a new way, via a public roadmap, to make sure that as many people as possible know about the exciting improvements we’re bringing to the service.

Today we’re launching the Office 365 for business public roadmap. The Office 365 for business public roadmap provides you with a way to learn more about upcoming updates before the change comes to your service. It provides a few months’ view of new features, enhancements, and major updates. In some cases we may communicate farther in advance than a few months, like when we announced our long-term investments in the new service Codenamed “Oslo” and the Office Graph. We will provide visibility to planned updates that are in development and in the process of being rolled out to the service, as well as to items that have been launched and are now generally available for all eligible customers. The public roadmap will be your best source of truth for product enhancements coming to the service.

Move to the front of the line with First Release

In addition to the public roadmap, we are also rolling out a new program called First Release. First Release gives customers who opt-in the opportunity to get a small selection of significant enhancements to the Office 365 user experience, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online first. If you opt-in to First Release, you will receive new qualifying feature updates first, a minimum of two weeks before customers in our standard release group.

Updates to Lync Online, Exchange Online Protection, Office 365 ProPlus, or other related services are not included in the First Release program at this time.

By default, all Office 365 customers are part of the standard release group. If you’re in this group, you will receive the new feature updates a minimum of two weeks after availability in First Release. The vast majority of service updates will be made available to all customers via our standard release processes.

Over the past week we began the rollout of the First Release opt-in. If your organization is interested in opting into the release group, an Office 365 admin can log into the admin portal and select First Release under service settings. Go to Admin > Service settings > Updates.

Watch an overview of how we’re improving update communications

Here’s a live Garage series recording from TechEd in which Jeremy Chapman and I describe some of the differences between our on-premises release process and the Office 365 service updates process, provide more detail on our approach to change management, and discuss improvements we’re releasing today.

Built upon a great foundation

These enhancements are built upon previous enhancements we have made to Message Center to improve visibility to changes impacting your service. As we announced in April, Message Center continues to evolve to better communicate service changes and updates. Both the Office 365 for business public roadmap and the First Release program will use the message center to notify you about updates and changes to your service.

We’re excited about these service enhancements and hope they will help improve your ability to stay informed about the valuable improvements and changes we are bringing to the service. Like any feature within the service, how we communicate and the tools and programs we provide to help you manage change will improve over time.

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