Is it just me? Office 365 now tells if your business is offline

Recently I wrote about the new RSS feature of the Office 365 Service Health notification system which allows customers to keep track of service notifications and planned maintenance.

Just this last week the Office 365 team improved the relevancy of Service Health by making it tenant specific.

(The term “tenant” in cloud-speak is an individual customer. Similar to a building where a tenant rents space in an office, the same applies for cloud environments where customers are tenants who subscribe to the shared services.)

Previously in Office 365 when you viewed Service Health it would show information and availability that was relevant to the regional data centre your subscription was served from (eg. the street your office building is in). The new improvement shows information that is relevant to your individual Office 365 environment.

Why is this better?

In the past when there may have been a service degradation it would not necessarily affect all customers or users. As we’ve seen in the past the Internet would light up with news of an “Office 365 outage” where in fact it may have only been affecting a small handful of customers or a particular region.

Now if there is news of an “outage”, administrators of Office 365 customers can now log in and check the Service Health to see if it affects them specifically.

This is a great step forward in personalising the cloud to be more relevant to the individual customer.

Loryan Strant is a Microsoft Office 365 MVP (Most Valuable Professional). Follow him on Twitter @TheCloudMouth