M365 Changelog: (Updated) Microsoft 365 admin center – New ways to find advanced deployment guides

MC470781 – Updated December 16, 2022: Microsoft has updated the content below with additional details. Thank you for your patience.

The Advanced deployment guides & assistance page in the Microsoft 365 admin center and the setup.microsoft.com website are both getting new looks and additional features. We’re updating the search tools, recommendations, and layout of both locations so it’ll be easier to find guides for the product you’re deploying. Included in the new layout are views that highlight guides for Secure Score, Compliance Score, and Adoption Score improvement. You’ll also see new guides on setup.microsoft.com that are currently available only within the Microsoft 365 admin center.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 102402

When this will happen:

Updates to the search tools, recommendations, and layout for both locations will be available in mid-December. Secure Score, Compliance Score, and Adoption score views on the Advanced deployment guides & assistance page will also be available mid-December, with a visual representation of each score coming at a later date. 

How this will affect your organization:

Advanced deployment guides give admins tailored guidance and resources for planning and deploying tenant settings, apps, and services in step-by-step instructions. They include automated configuration tools, scripts, and best practices from Microsoft FastTrack deployment specialists. 

In the Microsoft 365 admin center, the Advanced deployment guides & assistance page hosts more than 40 guides that cover Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Viva, and Exchange. We’ll remove the All guides and Overview sections and replace them with a combined view that has improved search and filtering features. There will be new pages to highlight guides that help with improving your security, compliance, and adoption scores.

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The Secure Score view on the Advanced deployment guides & assistance page.

Other key features include:

• Share your deployment journey with key stakeholders by exporting your progress to a .csv file.
• See the most important actions front and center in the Suggested guides section. In future updates, these suggestions will be tailored to your configuration and licenses.
• Tags to notify you when a new or updated guide has been released since your last visit to the page.

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The Suggested guides view on the Advanced deployment guides & assistance page.

Setup.microsoft.com is the home for Advanced deployment guides outside the Microsoft 365 admin center. You can’t use guides on this site to directly configure your tenant, but they still offer step-by-step deployment tips for users who can’t directly sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center, or who only have permissions to access other admin centers. This site also hosts guides to help you discover and try Microsoft 365 services before making a purchase.

Key updates to this site include:

• New child pages for each product so you can find more details about the product along with the related deployment guide.
• Find guides for specific products or for deployment scenarios with our updated search functionality.
• Guides currently only available in the Microsoft 365 admin center will be added to this site by January.

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The updated design of the setup.microsoft.com site with new areas to find guides by product or scenario.

What you need to do to prepare:

If you’ve bookmarked sections of the Advanced deployment guides & assistance page, those links will redirect to the new Deployment guides section. You might need to make IT staff in your org aware of the new navigation. You don’t need to do anything to prepare for the changes on setup.microsoft.com.

Additional information