Message Center to Planner - How to manage change in Microsoft 365 using Planner

Organisations that use #Microsoft365 need to become accustomed to frequent changes and improvements. The Microsoft 365 Message Center is one place to learn about the changes coming to your subscription. Learn about updates to features and services, and what your org needs to do to prepare. Stay informed about new services and features, or low impact changes. But the advice in the Message Center often doesn't make it to people who can action the change.

In this video I talk with Brian Smith, a Senior Escalation engineer from Microsoft Planner team. Brian has helped to develop a solution that bring messages from the Message Center into a Planner plan. This makes the messages more accessible to more roles that have a responsibility to manage change in their organisation. Furthermore, a message becomes a task that can be assigned to multiple people, checklists can be used for related steps to action change. Comments on the task can be used to discuss the progress of the change. With Planner in Microsoft Team, separate plans can be used with channels, to leverage the collaborative efforts in a team.

• 1:45 The inspiration for 'Message Center to Planner'

• 2:09 "The plans for the destruction of your planet were on Alpha Centauri. It's not our fault you didn't read the plans."

• 2:50 Expose the messages in Planner using the Message Center API.

• 3:13 Assign the tasks to a specific person in a role, to action the message.

• 4:35 Using Message Center to Planner in Change Management. Get messages in front of people and plan to action the messages.

• 5:38 "You didn't tell us we were going to turn your SharePoint sites into Modern SharePoint sites."

• 6:59 What can you do in Planner to action a Message Center message?

• 9:26 DEMO - Message Center API, Azure Functions, and Planner.

• 10:22 DEMO - Messages in buckets for each product. New and Updated features.

• 10:50 DEMO - Tagging a task to reflect the message type (Stay Informed, Advisory, Plan for Change, etc.)

• 11:54 DEMO - Using different views of Planner for resourcing actions for Message Center messages.

• 12:39 DEMO - Adding comments to discuss the progress on actioning a message.

• 13:37 DEMO - Behind the scenes. PowerShell and Azure functions.

• 13:58 Running costs for the solution. Very low.

• 15:50 Where can you get the 'Message Center to Planner' solution. aka.ms/MCtoPlanner

• 19:07 Shortlink to the GitHub solution and where to send feedback. sharemcfeedback@microsoft.com.