by We are all familiar with the Message Center in the Microsoft 365 Admin portal, the central place where administrators are kept informed of important announcements, updates, and changes within Microsoft 365 services such as Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams, Intune, and more. But who follows this up daily? To be honest, I myself am not a hero for watching this with regularity!
What exactly can you do with it? Here are the main features of the Message Center:
- Track updates and announcements: You’ll see notifications about new features being rolled out, changes to existing functionality, security updates, service impact, or scheduled maintenance activities
- Action-oriented advice: many messages contain recommendations or requirements for action, such as adjusting settings or informing end users.
- Filtering by product or impact level: you can filter messages by specific products (such as Teams or Intune) or by impact level (for example, only messages that affect users).
- Integration with Planner or email: You can link messages to Microsoft Planner tasks or have them automatically forwarded to email to keep your team informed.
That last point is the one I’m going to take you through in this blog post and show you how to configure this. Personally, I do think this is a very interesting feature. And to be honest, I didn’t know this option, probably because I’m not a hero in consulting the Message Center myself.
So let’s go and see how we can sync our Message Center messages into Planner.
Configuration
First of all, what do we need? An account with permissions to access the Message Center and a new or existing Planner. That’s it!
Microsoft Planner
Go to the Planner portal and choose on the bottom left for + New plan, and choose Basic.
Give your new Planner a suitable name, and for now, we are not going to add this Planner to a group. Choose Create.
Your Planner is now created and ready to use. Now let’s add some buckets to our Planner related to some services, like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Intune, SharePoint, and Exchange Online. You can create one for every service, but for now we will only create a few. Also, we are going to rename the To Do bucket to Microsoft 365 Messages.
Our Planner is now ready to be used for syncing the Message Center messages. So let’s get it synced!
Message Center
Go to the Microsoft 365 Admin center | Health | Message Center and choose Planner syncing and then Set up syncing.
Now, let’s set up our plan, choose the Planner we just created, and as the existing bucket, choose the renamed Microsoft 365 Messages one. Choose Next. In the next screen, we can choose which messages we want to sync; in this case, I’ve chosen all. Adjust to your own preferences and choose Next.
Choose which current messages need to be imported? I’ve chosen for the past 14 days. Pick yours and choose Next. Review your settings and choose Finish. In the last screen, you can also create a Power Automate flow to schedule when these messages need to sync. I’ve skipped this option during this setup. You can choose Close.
Now, if we wait a moment and head back to our Planner, you’ll see that the messages from the Message Center are now added as separate tasks. If you open a task, you’ll see all the details of the related message.
So now we can also move the tasks to the related buckets we’ve created and sort them per service, and assign the tasks to users.
That’s it, your Message Center messages are now synced to your Planner and are available as tasks to assign to certain users.
Conclusion
Syncing the Microsoft 365 Message Center to Planner is a smart way to turn passive updates into actionable tasks. It allows IT teams to assign responsibilities, set deadlines, and collaborate more effectively on upcoming changes.
By using Planner, you reduce the risk of missing important updates or required actions, and you can automate the process using Power Automate to streamline change management. It also provides a historical record of completed tasks, which is useful for audits and reporting.
