Stay Informed with Message Center notifications for Dynamics and PowerApps

I have been asked a few times recently how certain users or administrators can stay informed on important changes such as service updates and other major updates that may impact their environment. The Message Center available in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center gives you a high-level overview of planned changes, dates, and how this may affect your users. 

Most Dynamics users will not have access to Message Center, unless they have been assigned one of the Admin Roles that gives you access. Not all Admin roles will have access to the Message Center. There is a list of roles that DO NOT have access to messages HERE

In regards to Dynamics, those that need access to this information may have the Dynamics 365 Admin or Power Platform Admin roles. However, there are others that will give access to these messages.

There are some new read-only roles, one of which provides access to Message Center messages without the additional access that comes with the admin roles.

One of these being the Message Center Reader role:

When a user is granted this role, they can navigate to https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/

Under the Health tab, they will see Message Center

It's important to note, that they will also have read-only access to users, groups, domains and subscriptions.

From there, they can change their preferences for which messages they want to see. It will take up to 8 hours for changes to these settings to take effect. 

You can also select the option to get a weekly digest of messages, including the ability to add two additional emails that can receive these notifications. Since the Admin roles may not be as granular as some would hope, you can create a distribution list to send to a specific group of people that may need these notifications to plan accordingly. This weekly digest goes out on Mondays only and you must be opted in by the prior Saturday to get the digest for that week

If the Message Center Reader role provides too much access, such as visibility to other service notifications, you can setup one user that is allowed to have visibility to these messages and configure their preferences to only show Dynamics messages and then add other user email addresses in their preferences or setup a forwarding rule within Outlook.

Since this is only weekly, it obviously does not provide real-time notifications as some would like. There are two options to configure real-time notifications, using either Power Automate or the Microsoft Office 365 Service Communications API.

There is a great blog post HERE from one of our Fast Track Solution Architects on how to use a Power Automate flow to configure and receive real-time notifications.

Additionally, another one of our Premier Field Engineers, Ali Youssefi, has a blog post HERE on using the Microsoft Office 365 Service Communications API to setup real-time notifications.

Thanks for reading!

Aaron Richards