Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Zohar Raz

Divyachapan Sridharan Padur

Jianfeng Cai

Mustafaraj M Dhrolia

Rahul Nigam

Nidhi Verma

Mark Raymond Gilbert

Brian G O'Connor

Ankur Jauhari

Peter Kenneth Harwood

Randy David Thomson

Roshane Silva

Chandramouleeswaran Krishnaswamy

Patrick Simek

Balinder Malhi

Darius Snapkauskas

Le Chang

Kalyan K Kona

Corey Roussel

Min Shao

Atanu Banerjee

Jian Zhang

Shobana Krishnamoorthy

Neetha Sumana Tuluri

Sundar Paranthaman

Bharathwaj Raam Sampathkumar

Fuyuan Bie

Brad Smith

Tarun Bhatia

Dexter Dauz

Nick Alfeo

Ivonne D Galvan Coiffier

A method of and system for customizing a rollout process of application features includes providing a list of one or more application features for display on a user interface screen, the software application features being application features that are scheduled for a staged rollout, enabling selection of one of the application features for enrolling in late-stage rollout or opting out of the staged rollout, receiving a request for enrolling a user entity in late-stage rollout or opting the user entity out of the staged rollout, storing a property associated with the user entity in a data store, the property indicative of the user entity enrolling in late-stage rollout or opting out of the staged rollout, accessing the stored property, when selecting a plurality of enterprises or users for the staged rollout of the application feature, and depending on the accessed property, selecting the user entity for late-stage rollout or not selecting the user entity for the staged rollout.

Method and system for providing customized rollout of features

Issues may arise when customers that are highly engaged with application services do not receive reliable feature updates on a predictable schedule. For instance, releasing and updating features may burden cloud infrastructure and/or may not perform properly. Not only are unpredictable feature updates associated with inconsistent customer messaging and potential service disruptions, such unpredictable updates may cause a random end user experience and customer dissatisfaction with the product. The methods and systems address these issues by dynamically ranking tenants and distributing updates and releases to tenants with lower feature usage before distributing to tenants with higher feature usage. The ranking of the tenants may dynamically change based on current usage. In this way, higher ranked tenants receive access to new and updated features after additional regression testing. This quality-driven, phased release of features enables load level management of computing resources as well as a predictable feature experience for end users.

Predictable distribution of program instructions

A system to reduce strain on server farm computing resources by over-riding 'off-peak' patching schedules in response to performance failures occurring on a server farm. Embodiments disclosed herein determine a patching schedule for causing builds of patches to be sequentially installed on server farms during an off-peak usage time-range. Responsive to a performance failure occurring on the server farm, embodiments disclosed herein identify a particular patch that is designed to resolve the performance failure. Then, the patching schedule is over-ridden to expedite an out-of-sequence installation of whichever build is first to include the particular patch. Because resolution of the performance failure is expedited, the impact of the performance failure on the computing resources of the server farm is reduced as compared to existing server farm patching systems.

Enhanced server farm patching system for enabling developers to override off-peak patching schedules

In one example, a server farm patching system may wait until fewer users are accessing a server farm to apply a patch code set to a server application executed by a server at the server farm. The server farm patching system may identify an off-peak usage time range for a server farm describing when the server farm has an activity level below an activity threshold. The server farm patching system may apply a patch code set at an off-peak usage patching aggressiveness level indicating an off-peak upper bound percentage of servers in the server farm receiving the patch code set when within the off-peak usage time range. The server farm patching system may apply the patch code set at a peak usage patching aggressiveness level indicating a peak upper bound percentage of servers in the server farm receiving the patch code set when outside the off-peak usage time range.

Off-peak patching for enterprise stability

Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and software to enhance the upgrade process with respect to software service deployments. In at least one implementation, a user interface to an administrative portal for administering an initial deployment of a software service is presented and a notification that an upgrade is available is surfaced therein. In response to a selection of the notification in the user interface, upgrade controls are surfaced in the user interface for controlling a pace of the upgrade with respect to service components of the initial deployment. The upgrade is then applied incrementally to the service components based least in part on the pace of the upgrade specified via the upgrade controls.

Dynamic pacing for service upgrades

In one embodiment, a network system may be upgraded without losing access to write privileges to a network fileduring the system upgrade. A network file management systemmay execute a system upgrade. A network file management systemmay provide direct write access for a data fileto a user throughout the system upgrade.

Seamless upgrade for network system

A diagnostic dashboard for web applications is provided. The dashboard is presented in a portion of a web page in response to activation of a control in form of a frame along with partially displayed web page contents. Designers and administrators are provided informative data to assist them in discovering root causes for page malfunctioning or slowness, and are enabled to access call stack and exception information in error messages.

Diagnostic dashboard for web pages

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Zohar Raz