Mapping the New Microsoft 365 Roadmap
The Office 365 Roadmap has gotten more complicated and longer with every release cycle and customer idea for new features, it seems. In fact, it got so overgrown, that they recently deposed the Office 365 Roadmap as the emperor of a past dynasty and have replaced it with a new, younger and better looking leader and knower of all knowledge, the Microsoft 365 Roadmap.
While the documentation people are busy chiseling the names of the old roadmap off of the statues and monuments of the past, let’s take a minute to look at the new Microsoft 365 Roadmap.
The Microsoft 365 Roadmap is now a one stop shop for feature status that is In Development, Rolling Out, and Recently Launched.
We are all trying to find good ways to think about the vastly increased coverage that Microsoft 365 includes over and above Office 365. Now included are the feature roadmaps for Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility & Security.
Luckily, the new roadmap comes with a set of filters that allow you to select product, device platform, and on which version/instance of the Microsoft Cloud your search should be limited to (i.e. the Gov cloud, GCC, Education, Germany cloud instances, etc.)
Some of the best features of the new roadmap, though, are how you can use it to communicate with your colleagues and how to track updates to the feature items.
Quickly share an update with someone.
We’ve all been there. Someone asks about a feature in a meeting, no one can remember what the status is, so after the meeting (or while you quickly go ADD and ignore the Teams meeting call) you pop over to the roadmap and search for it. You find the feature detail, and now all you want is to share it with your team and the world. It so happens that there is a super convenient email icon in the bottom left of the feature detail. You click that, and an email draft with the link to the feature is created for you. Almost like magic.
Download your own copy of the roadmap
First of all, you can very easily download your own copy of the roadmap data in a .csv file. One click at the top of the list (It really can’t get any easier than that!) and you have your own set of data to query, or build your own tracking system on.
(When you build an app that compares a collection of roadmap.csv files and maps out update frequencies, features that are updating the most rapidly, features that are not getting enough attention (taking too long), then please let me know! I’d track that.)
Until that is available, however,…
Use the RSS Feed to track roadmap updates
…I’ll be using the RSS Feed to track updates to the roadmap. What? RSS sounds like Really Slow Signals? Or, as a millenial, you wouldn’t get caught dead using a message transport protocol that your father used to use? Not so slow, my friend, and what is old is new again. You should be using Feedly or some other RSS reader to track updates to web sites, your own curated news sites, and blogs, like this one. 🙂
Personally, the RSS reader that I use is called NewsBlur (newsblur.com), and it totally rocks. If you can afford it, I highly recommend you get one.
So, click the Microsoft 365 Roadmap RSS feed, grab the URL for the RSS Feed, and add it to your favorite news reader.
And, then you can track your Microsoft 365 features like a professional.
Special Thanks and Recognition
I’d like to include a special thanks to @joepalarchio, who managed the Office 365 Roadmap Watch website and RSS Feed for the past number of years. While the roadmap was called the Office 365 Roadmap, it did not have a RSS Feed. (Designed by millenials who had RSS Feed using parents?) Well, the RSS Feed offered by Office 365 Roadmap Watch proved so popular that the new and improved Microsoft 365 Roadmap could not deny the obvious, and the RSS Feed for updates was re-introduced. Thanks, @Joepalarchio!
Originally published at o365toolman.com on October 10, 2018.
