Office 365 - Working with cloud service vendors

Posted: 15:33:14, Thursday, Jul 9, 2015   Expiration: 14:34:09, Monday, Jul 20, 2020

Vendors of cloud services often make changes to their services without providing significant advance notice. It’s important for the UW tech support and end users to realize the ways that changes to Office 365 can occur. Read more for additional information.

  • New products and features can appear seemingly without warning. DoIT service liaisons will do their best to pass news of such enhancements on to end users before the new products or service changes occur. However, these enhancements are not always communicated to the team before being released by Microsoft.

  • DoIT may not enable all products and features that are available as a part of Office 365. Reasons for this may be include incompatibility with UW authentication or a conflict with another product/ service that is already available to campus. Again, service liaisons will do their best to keep the campus informed about the reasons for these decisions and the approximate timetable for the release of new features, if applicable.

  • In some cases, DoIT may need to provide a bit of UW context before releasing new products or features to the campus. For example, DoIT may need time to review and explain how the product works relative to other campus options (e.g., OneDrive vs. Box vs. Google Drive). Although offering a Microsoft product may imply endorsement for UW use, more mature and accepted campus options may sometimes be available. We want to be sure those options are clear and the different use cases explained (e.g., Office 365's Video app vs. Kaltura).

Questions or concerns about these issues should be escalated to the UW-Madison Office 365 team.

-- Office 365: Jennifer Rado

Created: 14:39:51, Wednesday, Jul 8, 2015 (by Jennifer R.)
Updated: 09:48:48, Friday, Apr 21, 2017 (by Karl W.)