One of the most frequent complaints among IT admins who are avid users of the Microsoft Office 365 platform is that it’s pretty hard to constantly keep up with the frequent changes. Managing these changes well so that one’s organization can take advantage of all the new feature sets and security upgrades is an uphill challenge.

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Before the bloom of cloud services, the change management was something that was tightly controlled by organizations themselves. Whether it be a new feature roll out to the client application or something as routine as a regular maintenance upgrade it had to go through multiple levels of scrutiny and at the end of it all there would always be a conscious effort to make the end users aware of what changes are headed their way – more often than not via detailed emails.

All this changed with the arrival of cloud platforms like Office 365. There is no doubt that Office 365 has helped make many an administrational tasks much more simpler and secure for organizations that have chosen to migrate to the latest cloud offering from the Redmond giant, however with all the advantages that it brings, there are also certain caveats. For instance all of a sudden you find out that Microsoft has decided to use some of their machine learning algorithms to help you sort out important mails from the ones that appear to be spam, consequently you are faced with a bizarre situation where some of the mails you’d expect to be in the inbox start going to a new ‘clutter’ folder by default. For organizations that are used to tighter change control such instances of addition of feature sets can come across as a rude shock.

Manage changes in Office 365

We’ll dive deeper into the things that should be kept in mind while trying to manage changes in Office 365.

Try to be up to date with all that is happening

Although Microsoft can be accused of having some history of rolling out changes without taking necessary steps to keep the end users informed prior to the roll out, those instances are more of an exception rather than norm. Most of the times there will be at least an elaborate email explaining what to expect from the upcoming changes and what degree of control consumers can exert over them. Here are few things that can help you keep updated with the changes that keep happening in the Office 365 world:

Follow Office 365 weekly blogs.

Subscribe to the message center weekly digest.

Subscribe to the unofficial Office 365 roadmap watch RSS feed

For Azure there are a number of Official documentation available like this one that can be quite helpful

What next?

If you’ve reached till here and are now fairly confident of being able to keep a tab on the changes that matter most to your work environment from the resources mentioned above, then the obvious next hurdle would be to deal with the sheer amount of changes that are set to be introduced. A cursory look at Office 365 roadmap would tell you that it’s easy to lose track of what’s happening if the change reviewing process is not executed in a well-planned manner. This is where professional planners like Trello or even the Microsoft’s own planner can handy. I recommend using whichever you are most comfortable with to get things done in an orderly fashion.

As most veterans would admit the best way of dealing with a change is to opt out of it at first. This way you can take your own time to execute all the necessary review procedures and then manually enable the change when you deem most fit. The caveat here is that since most changes rollout as enabled by default you need to keep yourself up to date always.

Conclusion

Managing change is sure a challenging task but with the right approach and tools it can be made less daunting. If you are willing to embrace changes to enrich your Office 365 experience, then keeping a proper tab on what’s about to come shouldn’t be that hard.