How do we get notificaitons that an update is happening?
I've looked through my e-mail and I'm not finding any notices that updates are happening, I'm regularly getting blind sided by finding that some devices are updated and others are not and then having to scramble or give up the lesson for the day.
-
Official comment
Thank you for writing in Aleece. Update changes and upcoming events are posted to the Admin Center (Message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn). Check the Admin Center Road map as well that we offer at this URL: Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365. Let us know if you run into any issues.
Minecraft Education is in the process of being fully onboarded as a product to this service. While we are onboarding, we'll be publishing our updates to the "Microsoft 365 Suite" product.
-
I'm looking in the message center and I'm not seeing any announcements relating to Minecraft in the list and if I search for minecraft nothing shows up.
1 -
Aleece Landis We are very new to using these tools! We understand the need to get more advanced notice and we're onboarding to these tools to communicate better with IT Admins.
There are currently 3 items on the Roadmap, but you have to search by name to see them. We are still working with the system owners to get Minecraft Education added as a product in the drop down. And we'll be publishing our first message center message next week.
0 -
I was sure I used to get e-mail news/Announcements for Minecraft Education edition but I don't know why they stopped.
Ok. I thought that somewhere related to the minecraft education edition site there used to be some sort of email sign up to get news and announcements but I haven't been able to find it to "re-subscribe" since I missed the announcement for the update back in August and didn't know about this last update until one of my computers automatically updated.
Yea, having the update notices be within the message center doesn't really help if there is no way to subscribe to the "minecraft" specific updates and you don't know the specific title of the Items on the Roadmap in order to even search for them. Looking through the list I could find nothing that made me thing anything was an announcement for minecraft education.1 -
The announcements will be targeted to tenants with active Minecraft Education licensing. So you should see the first one next week!
Here are a couple of great articles that explain how to use message center. You can subscribe to get email notifications, and select a few options for what types of notifications you want to be emailed about:
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/manage/message-center?view=o365-worldwide
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/manage/message-center?view=o365-worldwide#preferences
You can also sign-up for the Minecraft Education newsletter here. This is a more general newsletter targeted towards Educators. So it won't have the same granularity of information about releases:
Your point about being able to filter emails by product is a good one, I'll pass it on to the program owner.
1 -
Ok I'll stand by to see if I get any notice about it.
The article about setting preferences doesn't really help since I still don't know which category I need to have selected to see or get e-mail specifically for Minecraft Education.1 -
The Minecraft Education message was published today, it should be in your message center.
0 -
Aleece Landis I realize I didn't answer your question thoroughly, and I'm glad you asked it. I went and poked around in my tenant and found the ability to filter the products that I get updates from in my weekly email digest. Since we are still onboarding Minecraft Education to the service, we're not in this list yet. We will be publishing under "Microsoft 365 Suite" until we are fully onboarded.
0 -
speaking of updates, when is the 1.19 update coming out? It's been out for Java and bedrock for a while.
0 -
Maxwell Petersen Minecraft Education is always going to be behind the commercial releases. It was actually rather surprising that we are already in release 1.18 seeing as we spent a very long time in 1.14 while the commercial release went through 1.16, 1.17 and got into 1.18 before we got the GOAT update to 1.17.
But they have made the announcement that 1.19 in coming in the next couple months.0 -
The team has made a concerted effort to improve the time it takes for us to move to the newest Bedrock releases. We've been able to move faster since we implemented our "evergreen" beta program, which allows us to test out our releases on a more regular cadence. The fastest way to get the latest releases is to join the beta program!
1 -
So in Late January there was a notice about the Wild update coming to Minecraft Education. That notice said, "We will begin rollout in late February and expect rollout to be complete by early March."
Any new updates on that? Seeing as it is Now Early March and I haven't seen any new announcements about Minecraft, and as far as I know, the rollout hasn't hit any of my students or computers yet, I don't know what is up.1 -
I see it's in beta as of 19 days ago. I too would love to know the release date.
https://educommunity.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/10939858344340
0 -
Actually, 19 days ago is just the most recent update to that Beta what's new Article. I believe the Education Beta 1.19 was actually out before I posted this thread Back in January.
1 -
The Beta builds do not have an ETA since we try to resolve bugs that get reported from users that test it out.
1 -
Aleece Landis thanks for the inquiry! I just updated the Message Center post and roadmap to reflect that we are currently targeting later in March for our next production release. This can change, based on any new bugs coming in from the Beta. We are committed to a high quality for our releases.
1 -
We also update the Change log page with every release - production, beta and hotfix. Minecraft Education Change Log – Minecraft: Education Edition Support
1 -
So I see a notice in the message center from April 8th about needing to change deployment from the store for education to the microsoft store but there doesn't seem to have been an announcement about the actual roll out of the Minecraft Education Update.
The last notice of that in the message center was back on March 21st.
And I don't seem to be able to figure out how to actually get the minecraft specific ones e-mailed to me. I have an email inbox full of notices and so far I've not found anything about Minecraft Education in any of them.
I'm still trying to figure out how to get an e-mail when Minecraft Education is actually updating. Again I'm caught off guard today because I didn't know I would need to handle the manual updates on several machines.0 -
Hi Aleece Landis - on release day, we updated the status of the M365 Roadmap item to "rolling out": Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365
The progression of squares next to the item is an "at-a-glance" indicator of status. We are still new at using this system so will take your feedback on how to improve communications. We are hearing loud and clear that there is a big opportunity for improvement.
We still have some work to do on the backend to show up as a full product in the admin center message center, which will allow you to choose to receive messages about Minecraft Education. We're currently part of the "Microsoft 365 Suite" product, and as you've pointed out, this product category includes a lot of messages from other products.
Almost all of the messages we've posted in the last few months have been related to the migration from the Store for Education, targeted just to tenants that manage licenses on this platform. If you aren't using the Store for Education for license management, you wouldn't have seen these messages.
0
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
19 comments