The concept is often referred to as moving from “waves to ripples”, a good metaphor to how things will change after the move to Office 365.Įvergreen is great, however it will put new requirements on your IT-organization if you are not used to deliver changes rapidly.
On the other hand, if your organization is not used to rapid releases and always being on the latest version, you will need to shift your mindset from “big change projects every five years” to “smaller updates every month”. This will save you time and money, not least as you never have to run an upgrade project again for i.e Exchange Server or Skype for Business Server etc. The reality of it is that you do not need to take care of server version upgrades, security patches, feature implementation or maintenance – your service provider takes care of that for you. The concept of Evergreen means that the service will constantly improve and evolve, without you as a customer having to worry about it. OFFICE 365 IS “EVERGREEN” – WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Microsoft provides good information in their service descriptions, on the Office Blogs etc, but this post is to be considered as “the lost documentation” of the holistic overview that often is requested by customers when they are new to Office 365. The purpose of this post is to give an overview to how Enterprise customers should comprehend and plan for ongoing change after Office 365 is implemented and all the users are onboarded to the service. The question is initially almost always formulated in the same way: “How do we create the test Environment for this?”. The answer: “It’s not that simple…”, and then the discussion follows, uncovering all aspects from handling operational maintenance to planning for unavoidable updates in the user interface.
Regardless of all these efforts from Microsoft, Enterprise customers that are new to Office 365 always asks me and my team for advice in this complex topic. They are also more transparent to their customers than they have ever been in regards to Product roadmaps (see the Office 365 Public Roadmap here) and Community presence (see the Office 365 Network on Yammer here). Microsoft recognizes this, and are committed to help organizations prepare for change by implementing various change control mechanisms to the service. The concept of “evergreen services” is still for many completely new, and customers often finds this parameter more challenging than the technical implementation and onboarding itself.
One of the top challenges for Enterprise customers in their journey to Office 365 and Cloud based services is the transformation needed to handle the constant service Changes that make out a natural part of SaaS and the Cloud.
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