We normally patch our O365 Monthly Enterprise installs with SCCM.

We noticed last night that a couple of devices are reporting that they are now unmanaged in the SCCM Office 356 Client Management Dashboard.

Looking around this morning in Microsoft 365 Apps admin center it appears Cloud Update is enabled for Monthly Enterprise Channel for our Tenancy.

Trying to work out if this is admin error, Microsoft error or some expected behavior that we missed the notification for?

Hi, we're in the process of migrating from Office 2016 to Office365. We would have done it sooner, but we have a lot of applications, and add-ins that tie into Office, and we had a bunch of compatibility issues.

With Office 2016, we've always managed to control feature and security updates manually via windows update. We don't use WSUS, but a solution called Tanium, which is a cloud app that allows us to push software, apps, win updates, etc.

We have opted for the semi-annual update channel for Office365 due to some recommendations from one of our core product providers, as it falls in line with their testing. My understanding is that we will get monthly security updates, though feature updates are deferred and applied 2 times a year.

My concern really is that Microsoft seem to have adopted this method where the products will just update themselves. What happens if a security or feature update breaks one of our integrations or add-ins? What happens if an important business process stops working due to a Microsoft Office update? It's unlikely, but it has happened to us before.

From what I've been reading, there are GPO's that will allow us to defer updated for up to 14 days. What happens if we cannot find a fix in 14 days? I've also found a Microsoft article that suggests that we can use Microsoft Configuration Manager with WSUS in order to manage and push updates. We don't use WSUS at all though, we use Tanium.

I was just wondering what other people do here? Are people just letting updates apply automatically? Are you using some other solution to manage and apply updates in a more controlled way? I know it's unlikely that something could go wrong, but if it does, I just know it will be my fault. Our business has a lot of custom add-ins and integrations with Office, and it could cause major issues if an update causes it to break. Ideally, I'd apply updates to several rings, over a couple of weeks, just to help prevent issues.