On Thursday, Microsoft released the Office 365 for business roadmap. The roadmap is basically all the features Microsoft is working on for Office 365, and instead of keeping these activities hidden behind closed doors, Microsoft has chosen to make it available for public consumption.
Just to be clear, the roadmap does not address what is coming for Office 365 Home and Personal.
The roadmap provides information on updates that are scheduled to hit in a few months, and even updates that scheduled for a longer period. The level of detail here is very impressive, as it has a bullet list of features that can be expanded to learn more about what is coming.
"Today we're launching the Office 365 for business public roadmap. The Office 365 for business public roadmap provides you with a way to learn more about upcoming updates before the change comes to your service. It provides a few months' view of new features, enhancements, and major updates," says Microsoft in a blog post.
One upcoming feature is Office 365 First Release. This will give subscribers at least two weeks to test features before they are released to customers on the Standard release cycle. The other is an update to SharePoint Online, Lync Online, Exchange Online Protection, and Office 365 ProPlus.
The company also lists 36 features that are coming to Office 365 that it is current working on for future release. These include Apps for Excel Online, Card view in Outlook Web App, Clutter View for Outlook, Custom UI, document collaboration in Outlook Web App, and Office 365 video.
That's a long list of features in the pipeline, and it shows how committed Microsoft is in making Office 365 the best place online for businesses to collaborate. It is also a clear shot at competing more effectively with Google, as it is the leading competitor in this space with its popular Docs platform.
There are more updates coming, but the company is primarily addressing the most important features that users want before talking about the lesser things. It's a good move and it could help with keeping customers around longer.
