One of the key challenges with Office 365 is keeping up with the numerous updates coming down from Microsoft. As previously posted, there have been some negative experiences as new features break customizations, impact performance or require configuration changes to SharePoint.
Microsoft today announced their new Office 365 Public Roadmap. The roadmap provides administrators visibility on new features that will be released in the future so they can start preparing for them before they are deployed to their Office 365 instance.
In addition, Office 365 Administrators can obtain early access to releases. This is highly useful for testing purposes – some customers are creating test instances of Office 365 with a small group of test users simply for testing these new features before they are available in their main production instance.