Send your Microsoft 365 Message Center items to a SharePoint list!

[MGLovesFlow]

Are you trying to add governance and manage change in Office 365?  Microsoft has been making headway on giving us the tools to get there like adding a custom administrator Microsoft 365 Message Center Reader role and access to the API's.  Now the latest announcements will be more efforts insupporting email notifications and other Message Center preferences for customized admin roles. It sounds like by default all customized admin roles will start receiving email notifications for Message Center and can customize their Message Center preferences based on what messages they want to see in addition to opting out of email notifications.  This will be showing up for all organizations in October 2018.  This is awesome news for governance leaders to ensure everyone can see the change Microsoft makes to your platform. 

But what about those who cannot and will not ever use the Message Center Reader role or visit the Microsoft 365 admin portal?  There are many stakeholders who need to be a part of managing change and make decisions based on that change but simply don't have the time nor live in those spaces.  Visiting the Message Center needs to be a group effort on how to handle change and who is going to take action on items that require it.  While visiting the Message Center collectively for your governance is good practice, it can be difficult to take action and manage those actions.   I am going to show a quick and easy way to get your Microsoft 365 messages sent to a SharePoint list where you can add custom columns like action item owner or task manager by using Flow.  However you manage the change you can capture the Message Center items, add them to the SharePoint list and identify owners and track the change. 

Note:  This Flow assumes you have signed up to receive Message Center notifications in the Microsoft 365 admin portal.  You can sign up to receive notifications if you are any admin role or specifically Message Center Reader role. Visit the Message Center to review: https://admin.microsoft.com/AdminPortal/Home#/MessageCenter 

Set your notifications in the Message Center preferences section. Note: Major impacts and weekly digest are the options, you may receive multiple items in your SharePoint list and need to parse the items if required to take action or monitor them in an itemized format.  

Let's get Started!

Quick and easy way to get your Microsoft 365 messages sent to a SharePoint list:

1. Create a custom list in SharePoint Online called "O365 Message Center". Add one SharePoint column, column type multiple lines of text and name it "description".
2. Create a Flow from blank and choose the trigger "When a new email arrives".  In the From field add the message center email address: o365mc@microsoft.com.
3. Use content conversion HTML to text to convert the dynamic content of the email body.  This is to ensure we remove HTML tags when it comes over into the SharePoint list item.
4. Create SharePoint list item.  Add the email subject line to the title field and the HTML to text conversion field to the Description column. Review and Save your Flow.

5. Test your Flow and review your SharePoint list to ensure you have the Message Center item added.

1. Create a custom list in SharePoint Online called "O365 Message Center". Add one SharePoint column, column type multiple lines of text and name it "description".  You can also add task owner or other columns to the list based on your change management strategy.

2. Create a Flow from blank and choose the trigger "When a new email arrives". 

In the From field add the message center email address: o365mc@microsoft.com.

 

3. Use content conversion connector "HTML to text" to convert the dynamic content of the email body.  This is to ensure we remove HTML tags when it comes over into the SharePoint list item.

4. Create SharePoint list item.  Add the email subject line to the title field of the list and the HTML to text conversion field to the Description column. 

Review and Save your Flow!

5. Test your Flow and review your SharePoint list to ensure you have the Message Center item added.  There might be some slight clean-up to do as the pictures did not come over into SharePoint but those are not necessary for understanding the announcement.  Now you can extend the list to add columns that align with how you manage change.

This is a quick and easy way to get all your Message Center items into a SharePoint list to expand the audience of who can see Microsoft's announcements without having to visit the admin portal, get Message Center Reader role or work the items in an area where you cannot add ownership to manage the change.  If you have gotten this far, now is the time to create weekly or monthly meetings to review these items and assign ownership.  Good luck managing the change and I hope this Flow will help you and your governance team operationalize the change in Office 365. 

Note: To extend this Flow further - think about sending the announcements to your ITSM systems like Service Now.

[rajp]

If we opt for 'weekly digest' option, there will be multiple messages in one email. With above flow all those messages will be added into single item in SharePoint list. It should create separate entry in SharePoint list for each message id.