New Teams features have been coming out an an extraordinary rate over the past year. It seems there’s a new feature every week or two. To manage the cadence of updates to users clients, Microsoft has moved the preview feature setting into a dedicated Teams update policy. As with the existing Teams policies, update policies can be created and assigned to users, any use who doesn’t have a custom policy configured will automatically inherit the Global, Org-wide default policy.

New update policies can be created from the Teams Admin Portal under “Teams” -> “Update Policies”.

Policies can then be assigned via the “Manage Users” option or by updating the user settings directly. Currently there isn’t much need for more that one custom policy which enabled preview features as there is only one setting available but I expect the move to a dedicated update policy is warranted due to additional granularity planned going forward.

It’s worth getting a few users to sign up to test preview features to give visibility of what’s coming down the line and to generate any training material or communications that might be needed ahead of time.