Forum Discussion
How are you keeping your associates up to date on Microsoft changes? HELP
I’m looking for ideas or best practices from other organizations on how you're keeping associates up to date with the constant changes across Microsoft 365 especially in Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Planner, Visio, and Copilot.
With so many updates rolling out daily from the roadmap and message center, it’s a challenge to make sure users are aware of new features and understand how to use them in our environment.
- Do you have an intake process for all changes or just some?
- Do you vet all changes?
- Do you have a self-service model?
- Do you have a centralized communication or training strategy?
- Are you using internal champions, newsletters, Viva tools, or other methods?
- How do you make updates engaging and easy to understand?
- Any tips for turning roadmap and Message Center updates into actionable guidance?
Thanks in advance for sharing what’s working for you!
2 Replies
Hey Shikenya,
Here's the process we use in our org:
We host weekly stakeholder review session containing reps from the key technical areas (365 admin, security, entra, adoption etc). We triage the message centre tickets (there's a link from the admin centre that creates a planner board from message centre tickets, we use a custom ADO board but that's just preference). Basically if investigation is required, an engineer will take a look and then bring it back for review (do we turn the feature on, does it need integrating with a wider project, no action required etc). Tickets are then passed to adoption for comms review. Some tickets come straight to comms.
We then collate and release a Sway monthly, containing all the upcoming changes, re-writing some of the language to make it accessible to end users. It's published via our Champions Network and as an announcement on our Viva Engage community.
TO make them easy to understand we tend to strip out most of the message to try and understand what benefit there is to colleagues, or whether there is a change that requires them to action (eg a button is moving etc). By collating them and releasing monthly, there's always a good few exciting updates to help sprinkle through some of the dry ones.My best tip though is to ask yourself 'so what?' for each change. Not every change needs communicating to end-users, either because it's niche or won't be disruptive to end user experience. Sometimes, informing service desk is more than enough.
Hi Josh, Thank you for sharing your detailed process. This is extremely helpful as we have been struggling as an organization to keep everyone on the same page with updates.
