Sync Message Center posts to Microsoft Planner
Published May 19 2020 11:34 AM 22.4K Views
Microsoft

The Message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center is designed to help you keep track of upcoming changes to Microsoft 365, including new and changed features, planned maintenance, and other important announcements. It’s where we post official announcements to help you take a proactive approach to change management. Each post provides you with a high-level overview of planned changes along with links to detailed information to help you prepare for and manage the change.

 

To help you navigate the myriad of information that arrives in the Message center, and more importantly, to help you decide whether or not to act on the information, we are introducing the ability to sync your message center to Microsoft Planner. This feature will be entering Targeted Release in mid-May 2020 and released to General Availability this summer and it will include the ability to choose which type of messages are sync’d and to sync messages on a set cadence.

 

Planner integration for message center postsPlanner integration for message center posts

 

Once a message has been sync’d to Planner, it will show up in Planner as a task.

 

Planner with sync'd message center postsPlanner with sync'd message center posts

 

As illustrated above, all Message center post titles will be prefixed with the associated service in brackets (e.g., [SharePoint]. When a Message center post is updated, the sync process will add a new task to Planner; thus, you could have multiple tasks associated with one post. To distinguish the update, the updated Message center post title will be prefixed with (Update). For example, (Update) [SharePoint]. For each task that is created, the Start Date will be set to when the task was created, and the Message center post publication date is captured in the Notes field.

 

Check out the new integration and let us know what you think!  We’d love to get your feedback!

 

--The Microsoft 365 Release and Delivery Experience (RDX) team

44 Comments
Silver Contributor

That's interesting and a good start. Probably will need some improvements to get really useful. That part with duplicate tasks sounds a bit clunky.

Microsoft

Thanks @wroot . We would love your feedback on how would you like Message updates to be handled.  

Silver Contributor

I know that this is not realistic, but with this sync and messages coming all the time it would make this plan/project never ending and constantly growing. Maybe it would be beneficial to split it in multiple plans based on feature/change final release date. But this is problematic as MS changes dates a lot (postpones, etc.). This way you would be able to eventually close the plan, once all features in that time segment are been taken care of. Again maybe harder to implement, but it would be better if planner could update the current task instead of creating a duplicate with an updated name. Because you would also have to move all the notes, comments and steps to the new one manually.

I like this idea a lot and am very excited to see it in action.

Iron Contributor

Good initiative.

Any update on this? It looks the feature is not available yet in targeted release. Really looking forward to this one! 

Copper Contributor

Yep, also waiting on this one and still not here as of 15th July 2020. I have two test tenants (one corporate based in EU, one personal in UK) both with Targeted Release and neither has this option showing up yet. 

Brass Contributor

We have this working in our tenant now, but one big thing we see missing is that Category classification (e.g. Plan for Change, Stay Informed) of the alert doesn't come across into Planner.  Hopefully, this will be added.

Microsoft

Hi @Brian Mirlenbrink, this is not something that we added initially, but it is something that I will discuss with the team and see if can add that in quickly. 

Brass Contributor

Thank you, @Paolo Ciccu.... that would be very helpful!

Microsoft

@Mark Wayt @Bram de Jager , Thank you. We are now rolling out to target release. Please leave your comment on Message Center Feedback ("Give Feedback" in the right bottom corner of Message Center page) if you would like this feature to be enabled in your tenant sooner. We will add you to the next wave. 

Microsoft

@Brian Mirlenbrink Thanks for taking time to provide us feedback. Please continue to let us know what is working for you and what can we improve on. Message Center in-app feedback ("Give Feedback" in the right bottom corner of Message Center page) is a great place to do so. Engineering and communications teams are monitoring your feedback every single day. There is also a thumbs up and down on individual posts which we monitor closely. If you leave your email address, we can even contact you for a follow up. Thank you again. 

Copper Contributor

We have this setup however the flow it creating is failing saying that the response is not in a JSON format.

Microsoft

Hi @Emily Duran,

 

Sorry to hear that you are having problems with this.  I've let the engineering team know about this.

 

Would you be able to provide this feedback directly in the Message Center in-app feedback ("Give Feedback" in the right bottom corner of the Message Center page).  This way your issue will go right to the engineering team for investigation and you can provide contact info for us to reach out to you if we have any questions while we investigate this issue.

 

Thanks!

 

-Scott

Steel Contributor

Seeing the same, have send feedback in the message centre :thumbs_up:

Microsoft

Thanks for providing the feedback directly in the message center. I have followed up with those who left feedback offline and passed on the additional information to our engineering team.  

Brass Contributor

Hi All.... I received the same "response is not in JSON format" when I first started testing with the Message Center connector in Power Automate.  While I've not found documentation that states the exact process, I've discovered that you must first configure the Planner syncing within Message Center directly before the connector will work.

 

Also, when configuring the sync you'll be given an option to create a new Power Automate flow via a template to schedule the sync.  After I configured though, even my original flow I manually created started working.  Hope this helps.

 

Message Center Planner Syncing.png

Iron Contributor

I'll add my name to the list of users getting "response is not in JSON format". Sent feedback via Message Center page.

Iron Contributor

First time the flow getting error. Once configured the planner, just sync it. It will work fine. 

 @Brian Mirlenbrink  Good catch.. 

 

Vadivelu_B_1-1595897408609.png

 

Iron Contributor

@Vadivelu_B Mine didn't behave the same way. Syncing from the Message Center manually appears to work but manually from Power Automate fails.

 

The automatic sync scheduled fails.

Copper Contributor

What licenses and roles are required for this? I've only been able to see the Planner Integration link from a non-admin account with the Global Reader role, which for obvious reasons wasn't helpful. I've been unable to see the link in a privileged account.

 

 

Edited to update - the option to configure sync showed up today on my Global Reader account. No idea why, but it's working now.

Iron Contributor

Hi @Scott Schnoll Is this JSON problem a known issue within the engineering team?

 

It seems that the setup and initial sync is working, but the PowerAutomate workflow is throwing the JSON error. I can then go back and sync through the administration message center to get it to update. Hope that helps.  

Microsoft

Hello everyone, wanted to post an update to the JSON issue as we are currently seeing more cases come through. We have a fix for it and have already submitted the fix to the current build. I expect the changes to be finalized by no later than Monday (Aug 3rd) and once that happens you should not see this issue anymore. If you continue to see this issue after Monday, please go into the Admin Center and go to the Message Center page then from that page click Submit Feedback and let us know you are still having the issue. 

 

One more note when enabling the Planner Sync feature, you must setup the planner sync in the admin center and not go to Power Automate to enabled the feature in order for it to work properly

 

 

 

Thanks 

 

Copper Contributor

@Paolo Ciccu 

Hello,

I did setup sync to planner yesterday (Monday), and I'm still seeing the JSON error.

Feedback submitted as requested. 

 

Iron Contributor

Hello, still not working for me. I have submitted the feedback.

Thanks for your help!

Copper Contributor

Hello Microsoft team,

 

we have configured this sync already and all looks perfect and I love it, except for the updates ones that create duplicate tasks, but we can organize them anyway.

On the other hand we would like to have more people creating syncs and send them to different planners, is it possible to be able to have multiple syncs from different people and have them go to different planners?

 

Thanks

Manuel

Microsoft

Hi @Manuel Cespedes , 

 

We are glad that you are liking the feature. We are aware of the pain points of having duplicate tasks for updated posts, and are currently addressing that issue this quarter. 

 

This feature is designed to help tenant level collaboration across admins and Adoption teams for Change workflow management. Admin level plan sync is an interesting idea. We are currently not pursuing this idea. But will evaluate. One item we are looking to improve on is the ability to customer which messages get sync'd to which plan or bucket, but not have admin level syncing.  

 

Thanks for the feedback 

 

Steel Contributor

Could you please include in the content, the part of the message that says whether it is Stay Informed etc.. to help us identify from the task what the category of the message is.

 

MC220295, Stay Informed, Published date: Aug 13, 2020

Copper Contributor

I am not able to see the "planner sync" button, what are the requirements to have this possibility?

2020-08-17_13-38-08.png

Copper Contributor

How do you set this up with a non-admin account? We have admin accounts and non-admin accounts, but I would like for this to go to a group planner that our admin account has no permission to. Is this possible? Can I create it from a normal account?

Iron Contributor

@LukTu Are you a global admin?

 

@mattm365 I tried to do the same thing and it did not work for me. 

Copper Contributor

@-MikeDie Lösung war das mein eine User nicht im Targeted war. Der generelle Admin user war im Targeted, daher ging es beim einen und beim anderen nicht.

@mattm365  Den Sync kann nur von einem Globalem Administrator eingerichtet werden. Wie ich das getestet habe muss der Admin für den Planner Berechtigung haben, da der Sync mit dem Benutzer durchgeführt wird.

Copper Contributor

Has anyone had success modifying their settings after a sync was configured? I don't see any place to modify or even delete the current sync config.

Microsoft

@mattm365 The Planner sync feature is in the admin center and as such you will need an Admin account to sync messages between the two. @LukTu is correct that the admin must have permission to the Planner Plan as well. 

 

@jmusson You can modify the settings by clicking on the Planner Sync button, the same one you used to set the sync up. It should open up the preferences from there you can modify the settings. Please let me know if there is anything else I could help with and if you are still having trouble modifying the settings and we can look into it. 

 

Thanks, 

 

Copper Contributor

Just a silly rabbit question here:  Does syncing using this feature remove messages for other admins or users with access to the Message Center, or is it only my personal view of the messages that's synced?

Iron Contributor

Hi @jmw872 I just checked and no the sync does not remove any messages from the Message Center for anyone.

Hope that helps!

Copper Contributor

Hey @Scott Schnoll,

 

I figure if you don't know the answer to this, you'll know who to pass the question on to:

 

So, a little background: I use the Microsoft 365 message center connector in Power Automate to drops news task into a bucket of a plan. From there I've been manually moving the tasks to buckets for the relevant workload, and if the new task is an update to an existing task, I delete the old task.

 

With the change to the Power Automate connector for the M365 Message Center (https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home?ref=MessageCenter/:/messages/MC229082) so that it updates existing tasks, rather than creating a new task each time an item is updated, is there a way to get the Flow to set a label when a task is updated?

 

New tasks (i.e. new message center items) can still land in that triage bucket, but if the Power Automate Connector updates an existing task, I'd like it to set a label on the task so that I can easily filter on what has been touched.

 

There seems to be no output parameters from the Microsoft 365 message center connector that I could feed into a subsequent step in the flow to manipulate the created or updated tasks. Also the Planner connector has no trigger on a task being updated and does not expose the Comments or Last Updated Date as a parameters, so I can't even set up another flow to watch for those changes.

 

Any thoughts on how I could do this, or do you know who owns the Microsoft 365 message center connector that might be able to help?

 

Hope you are well,

Martin

Microsoft

Hi @Martin Booth 

 

Thanks for reaching out, sorry about the issues you are having, I hope I can help clear up a few things.  The new change to update the existing task is not a something that is handled by the Power Automate connector. As you pointed out there are no output parameters from the connector because it only acts as a scheduler.  Based on the flow, the connector will run on a certain cadence, when that happens it makes a single call to the Admin Center letting it know that the Admin Center should run the sync process. The Admin Center does the rest of the work and handles the sync between Planner and Message Center. 

 

I did talk our devs about what kind of information we could send back to the connector but I do not believe we would be able to provide you with the information you are looking for in this instance. 

 

What we are currently looking into at the moment is different ways to identify the updates as we have heard the feedback that it is not easy to tell when an task is updated.  Ideally what kind of way would you like to see when identifying tasks that are updated, via tag/label in Planner? Moving to a difference dedicated bucket? Please let us know so it can help us shape the product direction. 

 

Thanks, 

-Paolo   

Copper Contributor

Hey @Paolo Ciccu,

 

Thanks for looking into this. I think setting a label/tag on an updated task would be great. I use buckets to track updates to the various workloads, so having the connector automatically move tasks would mess with that.

 

As a planner task can have multiple labels, if the connector could set one when a task is updated, I will be able to easily filter the plan for that label and see the updated tasks. Once I've acted on the updated information, I can manually remove the label and the connector can reapply the label if the task gets further updated.

 

I use a couple of labels for other things, but setting one aside for the connector to use for updates would be possible.

 

Thanks,

Martin

Bronze Contributor

I like this functionality to be able to keep track of the updates that are coming directly in a Planner. Unfortunately, it works less well when you have implemented Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for all admin accounts (and you should always have that). When I, via PIM, assigned myself Global Administrator rights and set up the sync, it works fine, but when my time-limited session ends, the sync also stops working because I am no longer an Admin and then my Flow can not run. It would have been very useful if you could make it possible to set up a synchronization even for accounts that are not Global Administrators.

Brass Contributor

Hi @Paolo Ciccu@Martin Booth,

 

There are different ways to organize the new tasks in the synced plan. For instance, I've created a process with the buckets (New messages, Reviewing, To be rolled out soon, Rolling out, In production, etc.) to track all the updates and to classify the services I use the labels/tags.

 

In this case of use it would be more useful if the connector's output could be an array with the synced messages with their corresponding task Id. That way the new tasks could be updated by the flow connector "Update a task V2 (preview)".

Copper Contributor

Getting an error when trying to set up the flow and I click "sign-in".

warren_smith_0-1631907468891.png

 

Any idea what the issue may be and how to resolve?

Copper Contributor

This has been working verry well for me during a long time but since a couple of weeks (i think) it does not work that well. Planner task will not be updated any more, instead it creates a new task of every existing task in the planner. One example bellow. 

pHelander_0-1650302922287.png

 

Steel Contributor

This has been working great for the past couple of years, but since a couple of weeks ago, the sync fails with a "bad gateway" error. Any ideas what might be going on?

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