In the Collaboris Collab365 Teams Guest Group someone came with the question how to test new releases beforehand and first deploy to a test environment before activating it on a production environment.
So here it comes. Your production/live environment = your test environment. (Unless you have 2 Office365 tenants and can use 1 solely for testing)
what does this mean?
Go with the flow is what it means to be in the cloud.
So I can not test beforehand? Yes you can!
Lets see what Microsoft says about it…
“A good practice is to leave majority of users in Standard release and IT Pros and power users in Targeted release to evaluate new features and prepare teams to support business users and executives.”
( from Set up the Standard or Targeted release options in Office 365)
Your Target release candidates you setup via the Office Admin Center > Settings > Organization profile > Release preferences > Actions …
- Set Release Track to “Targeted release for selected users”
- Set your IT pros and Power users as desired
Combine this with keeping yourself up to date about what changes are coming up.
“For significant updates, Office customers are initially notified by the Office 365 public roadmap. As an update gets closer to rolling out, it is communicated through your Office 365 Message Center.” (from Set up the Standard or Targeted release options in Office 365)
When a new function or app can be shut off/disabled and I conclude its really needed due to circumstances, I prep to do so as soon as the update gets to the world wide standard release stage. (happens seldom I do so)
Get the organization to understand the continuous update logic of cloud applications and let them embrace it for it provides constantly new features and options to improve the daily work.
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