1. Office 365 Service Communications
March 2014

2. About us Alistair Speirs Ian Hameroff
Senior Operations Program Manager
Office Deployment, Adoption & Readiness Team
Microsoft Corporation
Ian Hameroff
Group Product Manager
Office 365 Service Experience
Microsoft Corporation

3. Office 365 Fundamentals Agenda
Module 1 Introduction
Module 2 Office 365 for IT Pros
Module 3 Getting started with Office 365
Module 4 Deploying Office 365
Module 5 Office 365 Service Communications
Module 6 Office 365 Change Management

4. Office 365 Service Communications Agenda
8/23/2018
Office 365 Service Communications Agenda
Service Communications Philosophy
Functionality & Platform Updates
System Requirements
Service Incidents

5. Office Vision: Productivity Cloud Enterprise grade cloud
Essential productivity services
Enterprise-grade cloud
Essential productivity services
Flexibility and choice
Familiar and easy
Office Vision:
Productivity Cloud
Flexibility and choice
Familiar and easy

6. 8/23/2018
Waves to Ripples
Continuous innovation delivered on monthly basis vs month upgrades

7. It is critical that you understand what change means, types of change
Clear, predictable and reliable service change communications is critical

8. Types of Change Communicated
Ongoing Functionality Updates
Planned Platform Updates
Evolving System Requirements
Unexpected Service Incidents

9. Our Communications Philosophy
Timely
Targeted
Accurate
Flexible

10. Functionality and Platform Updates
8/23/2018
Functionality and Platform Updates

11. Office 365 Service Updates Principles
Continuous innovation with confidence and control
Deliver new features and value
Build trust and compliance
Respond to customer feedback through agile development
Continuous release cadence
Minor & major updates
Up-to-date, no patching
Security comes first
Evolving standards
Direct feedback
Real-time information
Common support issues
Insights to help manage change
Direct to customer communications | Organizational readiness content

12. How To Think About Service Updates
Functionality Updates
OneDrive for Business storage increases
Lync meeting improvements
Feature updates
Office Mobile for iPhone
OWA for iPhone and iPad
New Introductions
1-3 Month Roadmap*
Upon Release
Platform Updates
API change
Deprecations
System requirement change
Disruptive change
Auto-discovery configuration
DNS record change
Configuration changes
Bug fix
Performance enhancement
Security updates
Infrastructure improvements
One Year
Up to 12 Months
No Notice

13. Learn About New Functionality Updates
New feature posts to the new Office Blogs upon release
Reflected in TechNet Service Description after release
Visit

14. Message Center: In Product Notifications
Compliments other communications, provides notification and actions required

15. 8/23/2018
System Requirements

16. Office 365 Client Support Policy
Current and previous version of Internet Explorer and Firefox
Current versions of Chrome and Safari
Web browser
Any Office client in mainstream support
Office client
Office 365 won’t deliberately block connections
Existing features may operate differently and not work over time New features may not be available
Office 365 will only offer security fixes. No code fixes.
Older clients

17. How To Stay Current
New Systems Requirements section added to Service Descriptions in TechNet
We provide a minimum of one year notice on changes
US English Location:

18. Disruptive Change Policy
Unless otherwise noted, for all Microsoft Online Services, Microsoft will provide a minimum of 12 months prior notification before customers must accept any change that is deemed a "disruptive change".
"Disruptive change" means change where a customer or administrator is required to take action in order to avoid significant degradation to the normal operation of the Online Service.
The notice period will not apply to security related changes or updates.

19. 8/23/2018
Service Incidents

20. Service Continuity by Design
Redundancy
Physical redundancy
Data redundancy
Functional redundancy
Resiliency
Active load balancing
Recovery across “failure domains” regularly tested
Distributed Workloads
Distributed components are more resilient
Most failures are contained to a single service.
Service component isolation
Human intervention by exception
Automated recovery alerts 24x7 on-call engineer
On-call engineers are core product group members
Predictability and Inspectability
Incident avoidance detailed
Log and tracing to avoid SI
Rich forensics and monitoring
Complexity avoidance and graceful degradation
Standardized hardware
Fully automated deployment
Built-in workload management mechanisms

21. Service Incident Notification Process
Incident occurs
Service Health Dashboard updated “investigating”
Incident status posted to Service Health Dashboard
Service Health Dashboard updated until service restoration
Closure summary posted to Service Health Dashboard
Post incident review posted to Service Health Dashboard (as appropriate)

22. So, What’s this Service Health Dashboard?
First and best content
Regional
Updated hourly

23. Service Health Dashboard Continued
Status
Description
SHD icon
Investigating
Monitors have indicated a service anomaly and/or Microsoft has received reports of a potential service incident. Microsoft is currently investigating.
Service Interruption
Microsoft has confirmed that normal services are being impacted. Microsoft is taking immediate action to understand the cause of the failure and determine best course of action to restore service.
Service Degradation
Services are still active, but service responsiveness and/or delivery times may be slower than usual. Microsoft is working to restore normal service responsiveness.
Restoring Service
Microsoft has isolated the likely cause of the incident and is in the process of restoring service
Extended Recovery
Services are restored and may be slower than usual
Service Restored
Normal system services have been restored
Additional Information
There is additional information provided
Normal Service
The service is healthy ? i

24. Stay Updated, Anywhere Office 365 Admin App
Provides tenant specific Office 365 service health and maintenance information on the go
Available for Windows Phone, iOS and Android devices

25. Coming Soon: Service Health API
Ability to query a tenant or permissioned account and see service health results

26. Office 365 Partner Admin Center
View the customers in which they have delegated admin privileges
Find, select and perform administrative tasks on behalf of their customers
View their customers’ Office 365 service health status and details
Create, edit and view service requests on behalf of their customers
Create trial, purchase offers and delegated administration requests

27. 8/23/2018
Summary

28. Office 365 Change Management Summary
Embrace what change means when “in the cloud”
Visit and bookmark communications channels
Stay current on functionality and platform changes
Download the Office 365 Admin app
Leverage the Service Health Dashboard
Provide us your feedback on how we can improve

29. 8/23/2018
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, and other product names are or may be registered trademarks and/or trademarks in the U.S. and/or other countries.
The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation as of the date of this presentation. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, and other product names are or may be registered trademarks and/or trademarks in the U.S. and/or other countries. The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation as of the date of this presentation. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.