Traditional on premises applications and IT infrastructure could previously be controlled and changed by internal IT teams. However, with the shift to cloud services, this control has largely been taken away.
Microsoft 365 infrastructure and any changes made to it are controlled by Microsoft, meaning there is often no choice for IT teams to make when it comes to turning on a new feature or applying a policy change.
How is Microsoft 365 Change Currently Communicated?
Changes are communicated in the Microsoft 365 Message Center and Microsoft 365 Roadmap, and these are the main communication hubs for M365 change. However, they are not the only places where change is communicated.
Changes and updates are also communicated in community blogs, at events and in Microsoft Learn documentation making it a challenge to make sure you don’t miss any updates which could have a significant impact on your organisation’s M365 environment.
See this blog for a more detailed explanation of the purpose and information provided by the Message Center and Roadmap.
The Pace and Scale of Change
One of the biggest Microsoft 365 support challenges is how frequently it is changed and updated. New features and updates come flooding in every week, making it difficult for IT teams to align internal processes with Microsoft 365’s rapid change cadence.
Thousands of changes are communicated via Microsoft 365 Message Center each year, with subsequent updates to these changes for date and technical amendments not uncommon.
Empowering.Cloud track all of these new items and updates to items and have found that on average, there are:
198 new Message Center items and up to a further 150 updates to those items each month.
M365 Message Center Limitations
Microsoft 365 Message Center in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center
Although not the only source of information about Microsoft 365 change, it is fair to say that the Microsoft 365 Message Center is the main hub for change communication. Despite this, it is not always considered to be a very user-friendly tool, and as a result makes managing Microsoft 365 change quite difficult for IT teams and M365 product owners.
Explanations can be Vague or Complicated
One of the issues with change communication from Microsoft is that the explanations accompanying each change notification can be a mixture of vague or overly complicated.
These descriptions are often filled with technical jargon, making it difficult for non-technical specialists to understand the true implications of such changes.
Adjustments to Message Center items are also frequently made without significant notification. Common examples include updates to descriptions, some of which may be as small as a spelling error fix, or amendments to deployment dates, which are particularly important to look out for, especially if it involves a feature retirement that could impact users.
Lack of Information on the Impact of Changes
Currently, the M365 Message Center does not provide information on the level of impact that a change has. When a product owner looks at an item in the Message Center, they need to know whether the item has a high, medium or low impact ,and whether this change is impacting users, administrators, or both. This information is also needed to determine whether the item needs to be dealt with urgently to avoid service disruption, or if it can wait.
For example, MC920307: Copilot Pages coming to Microsoft Copilot, has both ‘Admin Impact’ and ‘User Impact’ tags, however the level of impact varies across the roles.
In order for product owners to identify how a change will impact admins or users, they need to spend time reviewing the item description, which in this case states ‘this feature was previously only available for those users with a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Moving forwards, Copilot Pages will be available for Copilot users with an Entra account and SharePoint license’.
Only when the description is reviewed can the product owner identify that this change will have a high impact for users.
Additionally, further investigation of the item description states that ‘the feature will be enabled by default’, meaning admins do not need to do anything to set up the feature, therefore implying that the impact this item has on admins is lower than for users.
With the pace and scale of change, it is both unrealistic and inefficient for M365 product owners and their teams to review every single Message Center item, especially when some are small changes with little to no impact. Product Owners need to be able to determine the level of impact a change will have and in turn, what action needs to be taken, by who and when. This is currently not easy to do using the Microsoft 365 Message Center alone.
Tenant Specific Data
Another factor making staying on top of Microsoft 365 change a challenge is the fact that change information is not always universal.
The data in the Microsoft 365 Message Center is tailored to your tenant, meaning notifications are based on your tenant’s configuration and the services you have enabled. As a result, different tenants receive different sets of change notifications, often at different times, making it particularly difficult for administrators to manage large environments that are spread across multiple tenants and timezones. This is often the case for large organisations and it’s not uncommon for changes to be missed.
Furthermore, due to the interconnectivity of Microsoft 365 applications, changes to one service can have unexpected implications across other products in the suite. It is therefore important for M365 product and service owners to be aware of changes in their area of responsibility, and communicate potential downstream impacts to colleagues responsible for other Microsoft 365 products and services.
To sum up, the Microsoft 365 change challenge is certainly real. The pace and scale of change is quite something , so when you add into the mix that data is tenant specific, communicated in a variety of places, and the that Message Center isn’t optimised for managing the data and disseminating it to the relevant work streams, it’s easy to understand why Microsoft 365 is often considered to be a beast requiring serious resource and effort to manage.
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