Microsoft 365 customers to get more detailed new feature rollout information

Microsoft is working on making feature release information for its Microsoft 365 software and services more detailed and organization-specific, thanks to some upcoming changes to its Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Microsoft 365 Roadmap.

Customers often want to know more details about which new features are coming, in what timeframe and how they're being rolled out to tenants and applicable users. With the goal of providing more of these kinds of details, Microsoft is adding feature release status for each new and updated feature in the Message Center in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center so that users can more accurately track feature availability specific to their organizations using a "status for your org" filter.

There are also plans to provide "relevance recommendations" for Message Center posts, so users can more quickly and clearly see which changes will be of high, medium or low relevance to a particular tenant. This relevance rating is available now for "Targeted Release,” or early-stage external testers.

In the Admin Center, users will be able to track feature rollouts across three stages on each applicable message. "Scheduled" will designate a feature that is planned to release to a customer's tenant but is not yet available to any user in the organization. "Rolling out" means a feature is starting to roll out to some applicable users in an organization. "Launched" means a feature is generally available to all applicable users in the organization." These more granular updates will appear on the original feature status messages.

Microsoft is making feature release status available initially for a “limited number” of Microsoft Teams, Outlook on the web and Microsoft 365 Admin Center feature announcements. The release status information will be available only for new and updates features that also appear on the public Microsoft 365 Roadmap and have reached general availability/production-ready status. Officials said that "in the future," Microsoft plans to bring this same release status tracking to "other Microsoft apps and services."

Speaking of the roadmap, Microsoft is making some complementary moves with its Microsoft 365 Roadmap starting mid-March and completing by the end of this month, officials said. Some timing terminology will be changing as part of this. Specifically, "preview" will become "preview available" and "generally available (GA)" will become "rollout start. The help content and "Sort by General Availability" filter will be updated to use the new labels.