PAOLO CICCU: Hi, everyone, my name is Paolo Ciccu,
I'm a program manager at Microsoft
and I work on the admin center team.
My main focus areas are on the Message Center
and today I am so happy to talk to you guys
about the new feature that we're introducing
and this is our Syncing Message Center posts to Planner,
and hopefully this will help transform
your change management.
Today, let's talk a little about change management
and how we can make that a simpler process
for your organization.
So starting with the Message Center.
This is our primary communication channel to organizations
about upcoming changes in Microsoft 365.
The changes we communicate can include but not limited to
new and updated features, deprecations and other items
that could impact your tenants.
We know that organizations can see
up to 140 message posts per month.
For it admins, it's important
to be on top of these constant changes
to their cloud services.
With ever-growing services and innovation,
tracking these changes can be daunting
without a good workflow management tool.
Organizations spend about four to eight hours per week
in managing just the content
across the various collaboration tools.
So we've been listening to your feedback
and we've had many interviews with various organizations
and we've identified several key challenges
to the Change Management process
when using the Message Center.
One, it's not easy to triage Message Center posts.
Two, in the Message Center, there's no way to assign admins
or other team members to that message
so that they're held accountable for that change.
So that means that you would need to find a tool
or solution that allows you to track these changes.
But having to manually copy the content
from Message Center posts to workflow
takes extra hours out of your days.
And many times the organizations that have teams
dedicated to Change Management of these services,
but those teams will include non admins.
So getting access to that information
adds even more cost to the operation.
At the end of the day, we have found that organizations
were managing Message Centered content
rather than managing the changes themselves.
So over this process, we have found
some best practices in Change Management
that we would like to share with you
and how we've come up with some of our solutions here.
One, establishing a Change process
and agreeing on the ownership.
We found that it is a crucial step
to making sure you have that process aligned
and that, you know, each step all the way through.
The second is making sure we're having regular triages
at least once a week.
Finding that knowing if it changes,
how to evaluate a change,
making sure that you want to take that change
is an important part of reducing
your overhead in Change Management.
Thirdly, ensuring the right owner is assigned to the task
and that there's a way to handoff to the next owner.
If you have a Change Management process
that goes from evaluating to compliance
and there's a different compliance owner,
you need to make sure that that compliance owner
has all the information
that the person who evaluated the change first has.
So making sure that we have that information
and being able to pass that to the next owner is crucial.
And lastly, having the right workflow management tool
to track and avoid moving content
over to places, to different places.
So things like Planner, Azure DevOps, or even SharePoint
are all considered valid workflow management tools
that can help track all of these changes.
So we wanted to help customers focus on managing change
rather than managing content.
So we've built the Planner Syncing Feature
for Message Center.
So how does it work?
The way it works is when there's an upcoming change
for Microsoft 365, we need to make sure
that the organization is notified of that change.
We will then create a message with the relevant information
and post it to the Message Center.
And that's where you see all of our change notification,
all the change items coming in.
From there, once it's in the Message Center,
we have created a way to sync these messages
into Planner and create tasks for them
so you will be able to work through them.
You may be asking why did we decide to go on Planner?
Well, when looking for an out of the box solution,
we looked at multiple different workflow management tools
that provided the following,
and Planner just seemed to fit the bill just right.
So one, we were looking for something
that was easy to triage, assign, and even track the tasks.
Two, we wanted to make something,
make sure that it was simple and intuitive to use,
not something complex, something like Azure DevOps
can be very complex at times
and there's a lot of different customizations.
The third and one of the most important ones
is that we wanted to make sure that it was available
to the majority of our users
who have Microsoft 365 offerings.
And Planner is one of those services that's available
in just about every Microsoft 365 offering.
And the fourth and last one, something that was lightweight,
something that you could view on a mobile app,
something that you could take with you.
So these were all the different things
that we wanted to do when looking at this feature.
So now I would like to go through the demo with you
and show you how this feature works in a live setting.
Alright, and onto the demo.
Here, I'm going to show you how you can set up
the Planner Syncing Feature within the Message Center.
What you'll do is go to the Message Center
and you will find a new button
located next to the Preferences button
at the top of the messages called Planner Syncing.
Go ahead and click that to initiate the wizard.
First, you'll get a little fly out
that gives you some more details about the Planner syncing
and the features and abilities it has.
You can also click on, learn more
about tracking Message Center, task in Planner,
to get the full documentation of this feature.
We're going to go ahead and set up syncing now.
The first step of this wizard is that we need to select
which plan we want our Message Center posts to go to.
So there's two ways we can go about doing this.
One, if you already have a plan in mind
and have created and are using,
you could go ahead and search for that plan
by clicking in the box and typing in the plan name,
or maybe it will automatically appear
if it's a more recent plan
or a plan that you have favorited.
If you have not, you can go ahead and create a new plan.
You can click on this little hyperlink
and it will directly direct you to the Planner homepage.
From here, you can go ahead and click a new plan,
name the plan which you would like.
As you see, we have already created a new plan
called the Microsoft 365 Change Management.
So clicking on this plan, you can see
that it is currently empty
and I have some predefined buckets
already associated to this plan.
We'll now go back to the Message Center page,
where we can continue our wizard.
So first thing you're going to want to do
is search for that plan.
So when I click on here, you can see that my plan
automatically pops up, that's great.
Let's go ahead and click on that now.
Then you'll need to select which bucket
that your message posts do you want to go into.
Now, currently we do have a limitation
that we can only sync to a single bucket at this moment.
But that may change in the future.
So right now we can look at the existing buckets
of that plan, which you can see I have five
and we're going to use our triage bucket.
Or if you wanted, you could create a new bucket
for your synced messages and just type that in here.
And it will automatically appear
on your plan when you do that.
We're going to go ahead and click next now.
So then second step of our wizard is now you get to choose
which type of messages you would like to sync.
So the first ones is you can choose all updates
or only major updates.
Now, for those who are wondering the major updates
are those Message Center posts
that are marked with a red exclamation mark.
You can see exactly how the major updates are defined
by clicking on this link and it'll give you
a little bit more documentation.
You can also select which type of categories you want.
So say for instance, you didn't want
to sync the Stay Informed as they may not require
as much actions as other types of messages.
You can go ahead and uncheck that,
and we will not sync any message
that has the category Stay Informed.
And lastly, you can filter out by services.
So if there's a service that your organization is not using,
you can go ahead and uncheck that
so you're not getting those messages into your Planner.
And we'll go ahead and move on to the next step.
So now you have an opportunity to import any past messages.
So the way the Planner Feature will work
is that anytime a new Message Center posts,
it gets updated into Message Center,
we will sync that over on a daily cadence
into your Planner plan.
So any new messages from that time point
will be synced over.
So any previous messages that weren't synced before
starting the plan will not be synced over.
So this is your opportunity to sync one of those messages.
And we've put this into different weeks
so if you want the past week, past two weeks,
three weeks, four weeks, yes, we've listed them as days,
but it's one, two, three, four weeks.
So let's go ahead and import from the past seven days.
And that's it, that is as simple it is
to enable this Planner Syncing Feature.
You will now get a chance to review
all of the selections that you made,
and you can always go back and edit them.
And this will take you right back to that step.
And you can change that if you were not satisfied.
Moving forward, once you click this finish button,
the Planner Syncing Feature will start importing
all of those Message Center posts
into your Planner plan right now.
So as we speak, it's being, they're being synced over.
The last thing that we might want to do
is you might want to set up an automatic syncing schedule.
So currently the two ways to sync to Planner
is you can either click a button in the Message Center
and that will manually sync all new messages over,
or you can have a scheduled cadence
where it can sync every day.
So if we want it to . . .
say, we want to sync every day at 8:00 a.m.
We can select tomorrow
and we can select our 8:00 AM time slot.
And we can say Repeats every day.
We'll go ahead and create this flow.
So we are using power automate to create this schedule.
Go ahead in creating this flow,
a new authentication box will pop up,
go ahead and say, Create flow.
Make sure that this is checked and then Create flow.
Once that is done, everything is completed.
You have no other items to do.
We can go and view our plan in Planner,
or we can learn more about the tracking patt--
Tracking the Message Center task in Planner.
So we'll go ahead and click done
and you can see we have automatic syncing already set up.
So now that we're done, let's take a few items,
take a minute to look at a few things.
One, we can go to our plan and you can see now
that we have those new Message Center posts
right here in our triage bucket.
So now you can go ahead and click on one of these messages.
Then you can see that we have all the details
from the Message Center posts, if there were any attachments
like images, we would attach those down here.
We automatically have a due date.
If there is an action by date
associated to that Message Center task.
So you can see Message Center 220931, if we go back here
and we look for that same Message Center post, 220931,
you can see there's an act by date of September 25th.
We've already ported that into the task for you.
So you know that this is when it needs to be acted upon.
We set everything is for medium priority
so you can go ahead and do that
and this gives you the opportunity
to now assign it to somebody.
So anyone within this plan, you can assign it to.
It's simple as that.
And now that we've looked at this and reviewed it,
we can put this into the reviewed
and we can just move this along, however your process is
you can move your task that way.
Going back to the Message Center, admin center.
We can go ahead and click on this Planner syncing button.
Again, once you do that, you will now see
that you have several options.
So if there's anything you want
to change from what's syncing,
maybe you're getting extra messages that you don't need.
So maybe one of these services
are something you didn't plan on,
or didn't actually need for syncing.
You could go ahead and remove it now
and moving forward it will no longer sync that service.
You can also sync now, so even though
that we have automatic syncing every day,
if we wanted to sync a new message that just appeared,
and we would like that to be into our Planner ASAP,
we just go ahead and sync now,
and this will sync any new messages
from the last time we synced.
And you can see here's the last sync date,
which happens to be at exactly the time
we just seemed right now.
Editing plan and bucket names and the plan name
is still something that you would have to do in Planner.
So clicking on this button will ultimately
just take you back to the Planner page.
If you didn't want it to stop the automatic syncing
and you'd rather just do manual syncing,
you can easily stop the automatic syncing here,
and it will not affect anything in your Planner plan
or any of your tasks in your Planner plan.
And you can always reset up syncing
at a later date, if you would prefer.
And you can see here at the top corner as well
in the Message Center place
that we have a Last sync to Planner,
and it will give you a date of when you do that.
You can also sync now at any given time.
Now that we've gone through the demo,
let me give you some tips and tricks
that we've learned from other organizations
who have already set this up.
And some of the workflows that they've managed.
So one of the things is organizing your plan buckets.
We found that one of the most common ways
to organize it is by service.
This means you have a bucket for Exchange Online,
you have a bucket for SharePoint
and you have like a bucket for Microsoft Teams
and any other services that you want to include.
A second common way is by phases on the rollout status.
And as you can see in the demo
we were using that kind of organization.
So we had something where we would review an item
when we're rolling that task out,
when that task was in production
and if that task is being communicated
to the rest of the organization.
So these are very common scenarios
that we have found in many organizations
when working through Change Management.
A third and less common way, but definitely very effective
is by work streams.
So one way you would do this
is you would have a triage bucket
followed by an evaluation bucket,
whether or not that change should be taken or not,
followed by a data governance
and then maybe a security and compliance
and your user adoption bucket.
So you have different areas in that way
for the work streams.
I hope you've really enjoyed looking into this feature
that we've provided and we would love to hear back from you,
and if you want to find more ways to interact with us,
here's some of the different ways you can.
Number one is you can just leave feedback
in the admin center.
We definitely read every piece of feedback that comes in,
especially all the feedback that comes in
through the Message Center, I read personally myself.
You can reach out directly to us
with this email address down below,
and if you want, we have a survey for you to fill out
at the end of this presentation.
Thanks for taking the time to view our presentation
on the new Message Center to Planner Sync Feature.
We are so excited to get this into your hands,
and we really hope that it transforms
your Change Management process from managing content
to being able to manage change more effectively.
We look forward to hearing back in your feedback.
Thanks for watching.