Microsoft Office 365 Public Roadmap – Released

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o365_logo_D_rgbThis is something that I am sure many of you are going to be interesting and monitoring very closely now, and I think it's great that we are now publishing updates and planned releases to our customers. This allows you to get a feel for the developments that we are making to the service and allow you to plan accordingly for the future, and further a more give you more information around decisions that you may have to make or scenarios that may not meet your current requirements due to restrictions, that may be resolved or enhanced later down the release cycle.

The Office 365 for business roadmap lists updates that are currently planned for applicable subscribers. Updates are at various stages from being in development to rolling-out to customers to being generally available for applicable customers world-wide. Expand an update to learn more about it and click the learn more link to read more details.

You can access the Office 365 Business Road-map Here: Office 365 Roadmap

NOTE
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.

activate_updates

It would be great to get some feedback on how you feel about this, be sure to check out the updates coming in the road map and i will be sure to try and answer any questions any of you have and furthermore when these are pushed I will try and give you more detailed information if required.

I shall take just this one, but I am sure for those of you whom have been looking at the custom branding capabilities of late you will be pleased to see this update for sure:

In Development

All customers will now have the capability to create custom themes for their end users. This includes a clickable custom logo and customizable colors for top navigation bar, menu icons and text and the Office 365 logo.

Join our YamJam to ask your questions
On Tuesday, June 24th the Office 365 Technical Network will host a Roadmap Communications YamJam from 9:00-10:00am PT to discuss the announcements in this blog post including, how we communicate service updates, the first release group, and Message Center. For those unfamiliar with a YamJam, it is similar to a “TweetJam” on Twitter or an “Ask Me Anything (AMA)” on Reddit, except it takes place on Yammer. It provides the opportunity for the community to ask questions and have a discussion with a panel of internal Microsoft experts on a particular topic.

Here’s how to participate:

  • Request access to the Office 365 Technical Network. All requests will be approved as quickly as possible.
  • Join the Roadmap Communications YamJam group. You can find it through by using the Browse Groups function, or through the search bar.
  • Log in at 9:00am PT on Tuesday, June 24th to ask questions, follow the discussions, and connect with Microsoft team members.

You can find out more information, and FAQs in an Official Article published here: https://blogs.office.com/2014/06/19/improving-visibility-to-service-updates/

Many Thanks!
James.