SharePoint Online : UAT and Production environments

Question

Hi Experts,
I'm working on clinical / pharma based company where we need to follow SOP documents(Standard Operating Procedures) and CSV ( Computer System Validation) documents to implement any software solutions in our company.

As we're planning to use SharePoint online, we purchased two tenants.
Development : CompanynameDev.sharepoint.com
Production : Companyname.sharepoint.com

Dev tenant is used for R&D, learning etc purposes but we wanted to do through UAT of the development before moving into Production and we don't have UAT environment also. So I'm expecting some experts guidance, how we can make UAT environment for UAT and moving the development pieces from UAT to Production also.

I would like know, how other companies are configured SharePoint Online environments for Dev, UAT and Production also.

Thanks,
Murali!

Answer 1

SharePoint Online and indeed, M365 as a whole, doesn't really conform or implement the old fashioned style of multiple environments for GxP type dev/QA/prod activities.

I feel there is some benefit to having a very small tenant which allows you to test global-level settings (i.e. implementing Azure B2B Preview for SPO), but other than that, everything is content in SPO. Having separate site collections for specific activities, such as building SPFx webparts, is not a bad idea (don't forget developer tenants can be had for free and are created on a per-user basis).

Other content-level changes, such as documents, pages, etc. can rely on the versioning system built into the platform.

You may want to have your quality team review https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/offering-gxp?view=o365-worldwide.