Your users will now receive emails with product training and tips for services in their subscription

[Adam Fowler]

Something for all O365 Admins to be aware of:

From https://admin.microsoft.com/AdminPortal/home?switchtomodern=true#/MessageCenter?id=MC152628

"We’re pleased to announce that starting on November 29, 2018, all users of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 will receive helpful product training and tips for services in their subscriptions via email. This feature has administrative controls to enable and disable."

I don't like the idea of my users getting potential guidance we don't want them to have without being vetted by IT/Training. It'd be great if there was a way for just admins, or a select group of users to only get these emails and then forward on internally if appropriate.

Users unsubscribing on an individual basis is good, but doesn't help in this scenario.

Update 7th November: There's an update on the notice - it's now under review rather than going live:

Based on your feedback, we’re making some updates to the plan for users to receive helpful product training and tips via email. Thank you for taking time to share your thoughts. We want to take time to review your suggestions, so we are pausing the release of this feature. How does this affect me? There will be no impact at this time. We will provide information on an updated plan via a new Message Center post.

I think this is a good idea to reconsider :)

[#2]

There is an opportunity for Microsoft to segment this offering thus making it more configurable for the admins.  Instead of on/off option, why not "On/Moderated/Off" so we can preview the content before propagating it.  We are still rolling out portions of the tenant and although the end users have access to products, we want to control training & awareness.

Having to disable it yet again at the end of Nov has all the makings of the Clutter fiasco we had to deal with last year.

Hey Microsoft, let's work closer with the O365 admins.  The online feedback on this option would have helped them configure this solution properly.

[#3]

Our users already get a high number of phishing emails. Many of them purport to be from Microsoft, with the intent of directing the user to a fake website and obtaining credentials.  Would users be able to easily and clearly differentiate these training emails from malicious ones? If they cannot, we would have disable the service.  Also bear in mind that the phishing senders will quickly coopt these training emails for their own malicious use.

Colin

[#4]

Right now there has not been a ton of details/information about the type of content that will be contained in these messages.

It is worth pointed out to anyone reading this, that this change is set to go into place November 29th, which is right smack dab in the middle of the holiday season where we all know lots of people are taking time off to use up their PTO before the end of year.

For our clients, we are recommending to start with the notifications disabled, not because we have anything against them, but because we want to evaluate on a client by client basis if it is something that adds value to them.

Best case scenario, this is a proactive training service that makes your users more engaged, and more powerful. I fear however this could also be a marketing type training videos. If they are not curated at all to what you have enabled, your users may be exposed to something like Planner or Flow, before you have an governance or structure as an organization on how to handle and manage it. I think exposing them to those products is important and good, but I want to control that speed myself in my own way.

Adam

[#5]

Another thing is that this is "simple" for admins that administer one tenant to disable. If you have several tenants and need to log in to each one to disable this, it can take a while for some CSP's to get through the clientlist.... Hope they will include some PowerShell Cmdlets when relaunching this.