New Boards Hub Path to GA

Dan Hellem

March of 2022 is when we announced the official preview of New Boards Hub. Since then, we have been actively taking feedback, fixing bugs, and adding new features. It’s been a long journey. In this post we will outline the last few steps on making New Boards Hub the default experience for all users.

Features only available in New Boards

In order to convince customers to try New Boards Hub, we had to bring additional value. We did this by adding some of the top requested features in our backlog. Below is the list of features (can also be found on our public roadmap) that are exclusively available to New Boards users. Creating new value has provided a carrot for users to want to try out new features and provide us with feedback for New Boards.

Outline of next steps

Rolling out a change of this magnitude can be tricky. We are being careful to avoid any negative impacts of New Boards. At the same time, we need users to try it out and provide feedback along the way. Over the next couple of months, you will see the following items being applied to your usage of Azure Boards.

Try New Boards Hub message for all users

Over the last several months, we have been enabling the “Try the New Azure Boards” banner and messaging to the existing Azure Boards pages. This was enabled across a mix of organizations across the globe. It is an essential step to collect feedback from users who elect to opt-in to the new experience.

Starting next week, we will enable the message for all of the remaining organizations. We will take another couple of sprints to collect feedback from those users.

New Boards as the default experience

In parallel, we will begin enabling New Boards as the default experience. Starting with our early adopter organizations. This will onboard New Boards for all users in the organization. You will have the ability to revert back to the old boards, for a short period of time, while we collect and address feedback on New Boards Hub.

Timing on when it will be applied to your organization depends on how well we progress. We are starting the process in late July and expect the last organizations to be on-boarded in fall.

Removing old boards

As you can imagine, it is not easy to maintain two user experiences in the same product. Once the New Boards is turned on as the default experience, we will monitor and address feedback for a short period of time. Timing on removing that old experience will depend on the feedback. But, as long as there are no blocking issues, our intent is to remove the ability to fall back to old boards as soon as we can.

How you can help

Your feedback is essential to making New Boards successful. We can’t fix issues we don’t know about. If you run across any problems, please report them via “Report a bug” or email me directly.

📝 On that note, some extensions (internal and public) may not work properly in New Boards. We have fixed the known issues at the platform level but many of problems have turned out to the extension themselves. If you are an extension builder, please double check the extension in New Boards and let us know if you run into issues.

Thank you for your support and help. We look forward to releasing New Boards to all of our customers over the next few months.