Notifying users about new features

Silver Contributor

I"m looking for ideas about how organizations notify their end users about changes to O365. Can you please share your approaches.

3 Replies

We have a variety of ways to get the word out.  For major changes, we add the details to a daily newsletter that goes out to all employees.  We also use a "communications center" where we encourage users to sign up for notifications on technology that they use.  We use that center to send communications about maintenance windows, new functionality, or potential problems.

We use Teams. I have a team called 'Office 365 Training' where I keep a Planner plan that has all the announced/released features. It's a public team and I've posted the join code to different places that people frequent so people know it exists. They can follow the channels they care about. We don't globally push the information because only part of our company is on Office365.

 

Once a feature shows up in our tenant, I'll post about it in the appropriate channel. I also start a conversation each Monday in the General tab called 'Tips for the Week of (date)'  where I'll mention anything new, either new feature or a training tip.

I like Robin's approach with the planner being there, that's a nice status update method. I would in addition to that we had our Homepage set to our intranet on SharePoint at previous company, that had a "News around Org" section of news, that was connected via Hub site and we had our "Public - Everyone in org" site connected to it. This would provide a place for all public type of training documents, onboarding IT related stuff, our Team contact / info, stream channel etc. I would just publish news articles as they came out.

I thought about having a webhook setup, that we could have everyone that wanted to, connect a channel in their Team to it via connector and have feeds come into their Teams that way, and then I would push the News articles to it etc. But I never got that far before leaving. Plan on doing Robin's method, or possibly having a connector to subscribe to like that, that could push News out to Teams, and because it's a connector, notifications work when they follow the channel.