Teams Insider

Mastering Microsoft 365 Change with Ally Ward, M365 Global Service Owner

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, tenant admins and change/adoption managers who need a repeatable process for triaging Message Center change, routing it to the right SMEs and deciding what actually warrants end-user communication.

Guest: Ally Ward — M365 Global Service Owner / Global Product Owner, A major international legal firm

Ally Ward is M365 Global Service Owner at a large law firm with over 30 years in IT, responsible for the whole Microsoft stack including assessing, triaging and communicating Microsoft 365 change. She walks through her practical pipeline for handling roughly 1,500 Message Center items a year — Power Automate into Planner, targeted posting into Teams channels, a bi-weekly technical working group, and Power BI roadmap reporting to leadership — plus how user comms and update channels are handled across regions.

Many thanks to Ribbon, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

Empowering.Cloud monitors 22 tenants and sees around 1,500 Message Center items per year on average; volume rises sharply for tenants using Dynamics, and the feed is tailored per tenant by licensing and configuration, so no two organisations get the same list. ▶ 6:10
Roughly 59% of Message Center items get updated after publication — most often a date slip — which reopens the Planner task and forces a re-review. Ward re-posts the revised dates into the relevant Teams channel rather than leaving stale information. ▶ 9:13
Each Microsoft product group formats its posts differently and there is no standard date field — dates sit in free text — so you cannot filter Planner by 'what lands this month'. Empowering.Cloud runs the Graph API blob through Azure OpenAI to extract dates into structured SharePoint list fields. ▶ 9:43
Ward's workflow: Power Automate pushes Message Center items into Planner, sorted into buckets per workload (Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, Dynamics) and labelled as user-impacting, admin-impacting or personal interest. Irrelevant buckets are auto-closed; leadership-relevant items stay open and feed a monthly Power BI roadmap report. ▶ 6:40
Because SMEs don't live in Planner, she pastes triaged items — including the MC number so IT can look up the original — into per-workload channels in a Teams team open to all of IT, then @-mentions only the specific SMEs who need to act, avoiding spamming over a thousand members. ▶ 11:13
A two-hour technical working group runs every other week covering two or three deep-dive topics plus roughly 20 changes; she pre-runs any Microsoft-supplied compliance reports beforehand so regional SMEs arrive with their own data, and Copilot generates the minutes and decisions. ▶ 13:45
For user comms she produces a factual knowledge article with screenshots and hands it to regional change teams to brand and adapt — she doesn't expect change managers to interpret the technical detail. Low-impact changes go to self-serve Viva Engage posts or a periodic newsletter; only major shifts like new Outlook, new Teams and the chat-and-channels redesign warrant proactive user comms. ▶ 20:27
Semi-annual channel is becoming untenable because Copilot features only ship to current and monthly channels; she recommends staggering — IT on current or monthly preview (about three weeks ahead) to catch add-in breakage before users see it. New Outlook remains a blocker for many firms as there are no COM add-ins and it isn't at parity with classic Outlook. ▶ 23:31
Compliance defaults are the real risk: Microsoft has flipped from shipping features off to shipping them on with an opt-out, sometimes with only about 45 days' notice — the Teams voice and face enrolment change being a recent example that some regions, notably Germany with works councils, must switch off. ▶ 28:05