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New Features
Why does it take so long for Governement to get new features? For example Sway was announced in Oct 2014, and Planner in Dec 2015 and neither is in my tenant.
I agree on all of these frustrations for G-tenant releases.
While I completely understand the need to get to compliance before release, it is hard to have no sense at all of when we might get a product that is heavily promoted elsewhere.
For us we are in the process migrating/deploying into O365 and have no idea when some features will come to us - makes it hard to write requirements or sent timelines for roll out.
It would be ideal for there to be a release schedule for G tenants that is released at the same time as the other tenant types so we can get some sense of it. Currently we really have that "not YOU" feel when items are not released to us yet and then put in a black hole as to when.
It would also be SUPER helpful in Roadmap revisions to have tags/filters specifically for G releases, so we don't have to dig around to know if this relates to us or not.
To also align the notices in the Admin center similarly would help as well.
Really looking forward to some of these releases...so any help you can give is great.
danholme
Microsoft
MicrosoftThanks for the "kudos". I can speak for the SharePoint & OneDrive team to help add some clarity, FWIW:
- Quite often, features released to First Release are NOT released to Government SKUs, for the reasons mentioned above (commitments to G-specific certifications).
- Depending on the feature and how it's engineered, some features are flighted to First Release USERS (where you specify certain users to be in FR in your tenant) and some are flighted to First Release TENANT (where the entire tenant is in FR, not "users"). Some will go to users first, then tenant. Some will do only one of the two then go to "production" (all users in all tenants). We try to communicate what's happening, so look for "First Release users" as a signal. Generally it's safe to assume if we don't say "users", it's "tenant". Unfortunately we're not always 100% clear--we're working on improving that. Because of this, if you have "users" specified, and a feature is flighted to "tenant" (or vice versa), you might not see a feature released to the "other" until that feature hits "worldwide" (production).
- Within a "ring" (e.g. "First Release" or "Worldwide Availability") we often flight in "traunches", e.g. 10% of FR, 50% of FR... so a feature may be released to FR, but you might not see it for a period of time. There's usually no way to "force" a feature to show up for you. We did allow you to "opt in" for the modern lists experience last summer by adding a parameter to your URL. That model worked well and hopefully we will have the opportunity to do more of that in the future.
- You cannot specify different users for different features (e.g. "I want Finance users to get feature X in FR and Marketing users to get feature Y in FR") at this point in time.
- Our SharePoint customers find that a best practice is to have a SEPARATE TENANT in First Release, purely to experience, test, and 'document' features so that they're ready to drive adoption and support those features when they hit their 'normal' tenant in production rings.
Hope some of these things help!!
- Chris McNulty
Thanks for the kind words Brian Levenson. Dan summarizes our release planning well - and if you want even more on the topic, I did a session at Ignite last year with LincolnDeMaris and Zohar Raz.
We still have a lot of work to do getting our customers the kind of release mamagaement I think we all want. One thing to keep in mind is that although we;d liek to beging with FIrst Release Users, not all features lend themselves to that methodology. FOr example, the impending release of cusotmer controlled encryption keys is a service level offering - there can only be one "master" key, and we couldnt mix or match encryption schemas at rest based on user-by-user file access.
