Preview changes in Microsoft 365 with Release Channels
Traditionally, to keep SharePoint and Office apps up to date, organizations dealt with costly upgrades every few years. Microsoft 365 makes that a thing of the past now that the software is hosted in the cloud and updates are pushed at least every week.
The downside of this is that the constant change has an impact on an organization. Important changes are lost in the deluge of Microsoft messages. Communication, training and materials become out-of-date. Your Help Desk gets tickets about a change they didn’t know was coming. Users might be unaware about positive changes that can improve their work.
It takes a concerted effort between IT, Help Desk, trainers and Change Management staff to manage this.
One Microsoft 365 feature that helps is “Preview Channels.” This allows some groups of users to preview changes before they go live to the rest of the organization.
What is a Preview Channel?
With Microsoft 365, you can release new features to some users before others. Microsoft refers to this capability under various names. It used to be First Release, now it’s usually called Targeted Release or Preview Channel. We’ll go with “Preview Channel” as that seems to be the latest naming convention.
Here’s how Preview Channels work in the Microsoft ecosystem (focus on the bottom row):
Preview Channels across Microsoft apps. Image: courtesy of Microsoft.
In Windows, Office and Teams, updates can be previewed by configuring “Preview Channels.” This enables key people to validate functionality and test out the impact without affecting everyone in the organization. We recommend IT, Help Desk and key Change Management staff have access to Preview Channels for Windows, Office and Teams. We don’t think the Beta Channel is necessary, unless your IT Pros are ok with a little instability in their apps.
How to setup Preview Channels
There are different steps to opt-in to Preview Channels depending on the app.
Teams
There are two steps to enable Preview Channels in Teams:
1. Under Teams Admin, add a new policy for users (e.g. Help Desk) and turn on Show Preview Features.
Teams Admin Center: enable Preview features
2. Each user then opts-into Public/Developer Preview from the desktop client under Profile > About:
Opt-into Public/Developer Preview from the profile menu in Teams
Note: At the time of this writing, there doesn’t seem to be any difference between Developer/Public Preview, but that could change.
Microsoft 365 apps
This applies to SharePoint, Exchange, and other Microsoft 365 apps.
The preview or targeted release functionality is enabled for most of the other Microsoft 365 apps through the Admin Center. Go to Settings > Org Settings > Organization Profile > Release Preferences and select Targeted release for selected users. In this case, you add users one-by-one:
Enable Targeted release in the Admin Center for Microsoft 365
More information about Microsoft 365 targeted releases is here.
Office installation options
Finally, the Office apps such as Word and Excel are controlled through a different setting in Microsoft 365 Admin.
For these, there are several update channels:
· Current Channel – features are released as they are ready and is the default setting for users
· Current Channel (Preview) – this is how IT and key users can preview functionality before it’s released broadly
· Monthly Enterprise Channel – features are updated once a month
· Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel – features released twice a year. We don’t recommend this option.
There are a few ways to configure these options including through Microsoft Admin. Go to Show all > Settings > Org settings > Services > Office installation options, then choose the appropriate update channel for your users. This setting applies to all users in your tenant and only applies to users that install Office for themselves from the portal.
Office installation update options
There isn’t a set release schedule for Current Channel (Preview). In general, a new version of Current Channel (Preview) with new features is released at least a week or more before that new version is released to Current Channel. There might be several releases of Current Channel (Preview), with non-security updates, before that version is released to Current Channel.
We recommend putting IT users on the current channel or on the Current Channel (Preview) and the rest of the organization is on the monthly update channel. This will give IT pros and Help Desk a few days to get ready for the change and users have a predictable update schedule for their Office apps.
Change messages and notifications
It’s also important to think about how IT admins and Help Desk are notified about changes.
In the Microsoft 365 roadmap, and as the time gets closer, the Message Center is updated.
However, not everyone checks the Message Center or gets the email. To distribute notifications more widely, consider using a channel in Teams. At Gravity Union, we have a rule that new messages are sent to a “Microsoft Updates” channel in Teams for everyone to read if they are interested:
A channel in Teams that automatically shares notifications from Message Center
The volume of messages in Teams still might mean that important changes get lost.
We also recommend using your employee portal to share critical changes and communications as well. The feed in Teams can get overwhelming, but a good editor who manages announcements on the portal can promote the most relevant updates.
Get more information
Here’s where to go to get the latest Microsoft advice about release channels:
Configuring update channels for SharePoint, Exchange and online apps
Update channels on Microsoft Office 365 apps
Let us know if you have questions about deploying Microsoft 365 and staying up to date with the latest and greatest. We can help configure this for you and give you scripts to make deployment easier.
