M365 Changelog: New policy settings available to control the feedback users can send to Microsoft

MC250671 – Users have the ability to send feedback to Microsoft from within Microsoft 365 products if you have not disabled this feature for your organization. Microsoft is introducing policies to help you more easily manage in-product feedback and surveys for your organization. User feedback goes directly to Microsoft engineers and helps them shape the future of Microsoft products and services for all their users.

The feedback Microsoft collects from your users will soon be available for you to review in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Keeping the feedback experiences enabled will let you see what your users are saying about the products they are using.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 72199.

When this will happen

New policy settings will be available via the Office cloud policy service in late-April.

How this will affect your organization

Currently, you can manage user feedback sent to Microsoft through Group Policy for Windows and Mac Office products. You can also manage user feedback directly for other products such as Teams.

With this update, Microsoft is

1. Providing more granular control over user feedback sent to Microsoft
2. Adding the capability to target Azure AD groups and configure feedback collection for your organization and
3. Enabling feedback management for all platforms.

Microsoft is adding these policies default on, unless you have already disabled end user ability to provide feedback:

• Allow users to submit feedback to Microsoft
• Allow users to receive and respond to in-product surveys from Microsoft

Microsoft is adding these policies default off:

• Allow users to include screenshots and attachments when they submit feedback to Microsoft
• Allow Microsoft to follow up on feedback submitted by users
• Allow users to include log files and content samples when feedback is submitted to Microsoft

Note: The new defaults within the applications will rollout in a staggered fashion.

What you need to do to prepare

Configure policies at https://config.office.com after logging in as a Global admin. You will need to search for both ‘feedback’ and ‘survey’ to review all five policies; see screen captures below.

These new policy settings are also available if you use Group Policy. To use these policy settings, download at least version 5146.1000 of the Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML), which were released on March 22, 2021. You can find these policy settings under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Office 2016 > Privacy >Trust Center.

Learn more

• Overview of the Office cloud policy service
• Learn about Microsoft feedback for your organization  
• Manage Microsoft feedback for your organization  

When creating a new policy configuration, search for ‘feedback’ to see four of the five new policies.

Search for ‘survey’ to see the remaining new policy.