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Change Management YamJam Notes From the Office 365 Pros Network on Yammer

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One of the benefits of joining the Office 365 network on Yammer is participating in network-hosted YamJams, online discussions that cover information from Microsoft itself as well as insights from MVPs, IT pros, and other end users.

Recently, the network hosted a discussion on change management, covering topics like first release, the Office 365 roadmap, and the message center.

You can check out the official YamJam summary here, but we wanted to highlight some of the best FAQs that came out of it:

Q: If I sign up our O365 tenant to First release, can I specify in advance which accounts to roll out the features first?
A: Yes with the updated First Release Select people option you will be able to choose which users you want to be in First Release.

Q: When the new First Release Select people option arrives, to apply to just a group of people, how do we activate it if we already have First Release turned on?
A: When the new option is available to you, you’ll see two options “Entire Organization” and “Select People” under first release. You can change the option to “Select People” and then select a group for first release. Note that people that are not part of the First Release group will not have access to features that haven’t released broadly yet. Note that it does not work for SharePoint. So if you have custom work done in SharePoint, you may want to stay with your current setting for First Release.

Q: I view roadmap.office.com frequently but it feels behind the Office Blogs announcements. Can Microsoft explain the approach to updating the roadmap site?
A: Right now the roadmap is updated about once every two weeks, although we’re behind this month thanks to Ignite. Overall through the roadmap will always lag the blog – the blog tells you when we either announce something or it begins to rollout. With the roadmap we try to only moving things to “launched” after the update has rolled out to 100% of applicable customers. The roadmap is a good overall view of the entire service. The problem is that it isn’t good at telling an individual customer what their experience will be like. We’re working to improve the Message Center and notification experience to be more specific since the roadmap will always be service wide.

Q: When logged on as an admin in the Office 365 the notifications can be a bit, persistent. Is it possible to stop showing alerts once it have been acknowledged?
A: We have received this feedback and are working to consolidate our notification story for admins going forward.

Q: Is it possible to restrict/stop emails from Microsoft direct to our users? Certain announcements like Clutter that went out to all of our users prior to us being ready to launch it. We fielded tons of support calls thinking it was spam/phishing. We would like to throttle the launch of these services and thereby would like control into change management and communication.
A: Thanks for your feedback! This is an area of improvement for us. De-clutter team has learnt a lot from this feedback and continuing to make the in-product notifications better (example. ability to brand email). Also please refer to for understanding how you can control these email notifications. http://blogs.office.com/2015/03/03/making-clutter-office-365-even-better/ Notification Center will include notifications about new features and other notification like new emails, IMs etc.

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