At Office365Mon we monitor all sorts of things about Office 365. One of the early customer requests that we incorporated into our service was the ability to monitor for changes in the version of SharePoint that have been pushed out to your SharePoint Online tenant. We have had several customers ask for the same type of monitoring and notification when changes occur in Exchange Online, and today we’re happy to announce the availability of just such a feature.
New versions can bring with them changes in the user interface and potential issues for customizations and apps. That’s why for many customers, it’s critical for them to know when the version of SharePoint Online or Exchange Online changes. Enabling Office365Mon to stay on top of these changes is quite simple. When you go into configure your Office365Mon subscription, there is a box that you can check to monitor for version changes:
Monitor for Exchange Online Version Changes
Monitor for SharePoint Online Version Changes
One of the main differences between the two is that to monitor for changes in version for Exchange Online, we need a higher level of access to the mailbox being monitored than if we’re just monitoring for availability and performance. As a result, we strongly recommend that you set up a separate mailbox just for monitoring if you want to have us check for version changes. This is one of our standard security best practices in any case for Least Privileged Access, and the extra permissions needed to monitor for version changes only reinforces operating with that philosophy.
One of the other changes that we made as part of this feature release is to add webhook notifications for changes in version for both SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. A webhook allows you go get a programmatic notification, and then you can execute your own workflows when you receive it. For example, when you get a webhook notification that the version has changed, you can kick off a process to do validation of the features in your tenant or custom applications to ensure that they are all still working as expected with the new version.
We hope you find these new capabilities useful to the management of your Office 365 tenant. It’s yet another feature set that has been driven entirely based on feedback from our customers. Please try it out and let us know what you think!
From Sunny Phoenix,
Steve
Share-n-Dipity 