How do i stay updated?

In Office 365 there are a lot of news and updates all the time and it is hard to stay on top of all the stuff you need to be aware of in order to be able to plan for upcoming changes. I do my very best to stay updated on what’s new within the workloads/services that are most relevant to me and my customers. My primary sources are The fabulous “Microsoft Community”, Microsoft 365 Roadmap, Office 365 Message Center, Twitter and LinkedIn.

For me it is important to share news, updates, findings, opportunities, obstacles and general knowledge about Office 365 and most of its services. I share it with Customers, Colleagues and the Community. For me this is the best way to learn and it is also of a great value for me that my customers are informed and updated so that we have a common understanding and thus can have a dialogue on how to manage and implement everything new.

My sources of knowledge also works as the primary channels i use to spread the news (in addition to all physical meetings). In my company we also have Yammer Groups where we communicate (and discuss) news and updates and that is a great way of quickly sharing the information to all of us..

Here’s how can You stay updated on what’s coming!

Microsoft 365 Roadmap

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Filter the Microsoft 365 roadmap on the service/workload that is most relevant for You and select the features that are “In development” and “Rolling out”. (“Launched is not very interesting unless you have missed something”).

Here’s an example of how a filtered url for looks like.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=In%20development%2CRolling%20out&searchterms=microsoft%2Cteams

Save it as a bookmark in Your browser or embed it as a page in a tab in Microsoft Teams.

Twitter

Create “pre-defined” links in order to follow interesting discussions and posts from the contributors of the Microsoft Community.

Office 365 Message Center

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View official announcements about new and changed features that enables you to take a proactive approach to change management. Set up mail alerts, forward alerts to channels in Microsoft Teams. You can also use the “Office 365 Admin app“.

Here You can read more about the Office 365 Message Center.

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Create bookmarks to follow the hashtags that are of most importance to You.

Microsoft Tech Community

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Microsoft Tech Community is a highly valuable source of information where you can (will) find information and can ask questions and quickly get good answers. If you have not yet joined, I recommend it warmly

Finally, Make all these relevant sources available in one place

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Put all the eggs in one basket!

Set up a Microsoft Team to gather all Governance plans and create tabs to all relevant sources in order to keep track of all updates in one place. Read more about how to do this in the article “Using Microsoft Teams to manage Office 365 Governance“.

Summary

Change is fun and motivating. It is only a matter of getting one or another method and routines to get the necessary control to be able to handle it and thus feel comfortable.

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With this post I hope that I have contributed some ideas and tips on how you can keep yourself updated in the jungle of all the news, changes and updates that are constantly being launched and rolled out.

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