This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.
We are pleased to announce the General Availability of some all-new Servicing profiles capabilities. You spoke, we listened. Based on input from admins from around the world, we added and extended controls for Servicing profiles. The overall goal remains unchanged: Provide a modern and easy way to manage your Microsoft 365 Apps updates. If you haven't yet, check out our documentation or introduction video for Servicing profiles.
But, with no further ado, here are the new capabilities we will cover in the blog post:
- Wave Customization enables you as an admin to create customized deployment rings and stagger the rollout of updates
- Rollback by Groups acts as a safety net in case of regressions
- Exclude Devices allows you to exclude devices from automated updates
- Option to target all devices simplifies the configuration of Servicing profiles if you simply want to go all in
- Adjusted disk space control removes the lower limit of a minimum 5 GB free disk space for updates
Wave Customization aka custom Rollout waves
By default, Servicing profiles staggers an update deployment across four days, updating a random subset of devices each day. With Rollout waves, you can customize which devices/users should get the updates first, second, etc. This allows you to build deployment rings for e.g. testing, piloting and full release by simply adding Azure AD groups to the respective waves. Servicing profile will then execute the update deployment according to your settings each Patch Tuesday.
If you want to learn more about this feature, check out our documentation or the deep dive video below. It contains additional details, a full admin UI walkthrough as well as insights into the design process:
Rollback by Groups
We extended the Rollback feature to support Azure AD groups now as well. Rollback gives you an extra safety net, in cause an updatre is causing issues in your environment. It allows you to easily roll a selection of devices back to a previous release. Now, instead of manually selecting individual devices, you can now also specify Azure AD groups with devices or users. We also have a video on what rollback is and how it works:
Exclude devices
Like the ability to use Azure AD groups to target only specific devices or users with Servicing profiles, now you can implement the reverse approach: Target all devices, except for certain ones. This might be useful if you need to update certain devices manually, through other processes, e.g., Remoted Shared Desktop (RDS) hosts or just them on certain update channels while everything else should be serviced automatically. Just add the users or devices to Azure AD groups, specify them in the profile and those devices/users will be left alone.
Target all devices
Servicing profiles offer you controls to target devices e.g. based on the update channel, usage of macros and more. But you want to go just all in? All Microsoft 365 Apps instances, managed or unmanaged, from all update channels, should just go to the Monthly Enterprise Channel and be kept on the latest release every month? We got you covered. There is a new toggle in the Servicing profile which simplifies the configuration. Just disable the use of additional selection criteria and all your devices will be serviced (Azure AD group filtering is still available).
Disk space control
The final feature is more of a small adjustment. Previously the lower limit of the disk space selection criteria was five gigabytes. So, devices with less free disk space were excluded from Servicing profiles managing the monthly updates. Most Microsoft 365 Apps updates require less space on disk during the update process, that's why we adjust the lower limit. Now you can bring it down to zero, meaning an update attempt will always be performed.
Let us know what you think
If you haven't before, please take a look at Servicing profiles. You can use the Azure AD group filtering feature to pilot the service to a small group for testing. If you are already piloting the service, consider expanding the reach, as the new features give you more control, insights and confidence deploying updates. Let us know what you think in the comments below or through the "Give feedback" feature on the Servicing profiles page.
Before we wrap, we want to give a quick shoutout to the Microsoft 365 Apps Ranger team (please follow their YouTube channel) as well as our customers who shared their feedback with us. Thanks for your support throughout the development process, helping us to match your real-world admin scenarios.
Keep deploying!