How to setup Development and UAT for SharePoint Online Multitenant

Question

We are migrating to Office 365 / SharePoint Online (i.e. SharePoint 2013) Multi tenant environment.

I want to make sure that we must have a Development and UAT environment which should reflect the Production so that the user can test their update before making them live.

User updates can be new List Templates, new workflows, web part page customizations etc. I have checked with MS and they don't provide separate dev enviornment. The only way is to create another site collection, copy or recreate the structure and test it.

Can someone share his experience or approach in this regard or redirect me to right resource?

Answer 1

Since you are using the shared-tenancy SharePoint hosting, Microsoft's suggestion is about the only one available. You can either create separate site collection to isolate testing thing by end-users or create a separate tenant altogether. If you were doing this on premise with separate environments, the closest hosting equivalent would be a separate tenant.