Quick Tip: Send weekly Message Center email to Microsoft Teams

Hopefully by now, you’ve heard of Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365.  Juan Carlos González Martín, an Office Servers & Services MVP, recently posted on how to get the e-mail address of a channel in Microsoft Teams.

 

This sparked an idea of sending the weekly Message Center notifications email to a channel in Teams, as detailed below…

 

Note: I decided to create a dedicated channel, but you can certainly do this for an existing channel or even the default “General” channel for the Team.

 

On the Teams channel you want to receive the email, click on the ellipsis and select “Get email address”, which will open a window displaying the email address:

 

channel-email-light               get-email-light-01

 

Click the “Copy” button in the bottom right corner to copy the email address you will add in the Message Center email settings.

 

While you have the dialog box open, click on “Advanced settings” to verify you have the proper setting enabled for the channel to receive email:

 

email-advanced-settings-light

 

Now that you have the email address for the Teams channel, log into the Office 365 admin center and click on “Message Center” if you have the tile on your main page or on “Health” in the left navigation pane and then “Message Center”:

 

admin-center

 

Once you’re in the Message Center, click on “Edit Message Center preferences” in the top right corner, which will open a settings panel.  Make sure “Send a weekly email digest of my messages” is set to “On” and then check the box for “Other email address” and enter the Teams channel email address:

 

MC-preferences

 

Note: If you do not see the weekly digest option for Message Center, you may need to enable First Release for at least one admin account to access the required settings.

 

Now, you’ll have to wait until the next weekly email is sent – for me, this has been happening on Mondays, but this may vary in your experience.

 

Once it does arrive, you can see the results below:

 

MC-weekly-digest-light-03

 

Now, you and your team can discuss these notifications and plan accordingly, all within Microsoft Teams.

 

 

Speaking of planning, you could create a plan for any actions required based on the Message Center notifications.  In the example below, I have added a tab linked to Planner for a “Message Center Actions” plan. I then created a task to submit the postponement of the SharePoint Online Public Website changes.

 

A brief description is included on the task card, as well as a link to the support article with more details.  In addition, I have set a label on the task – in this case, “Planned Service Change”.

 

mc-planner-02

 

Note: Right now, to get the fully synchronized experience between Planner and Teams, it is recommended to create a Team from an existing Office 365 Group. You can then add a “Planner” tab to your Teams channel and select “Use existing plan” to specify the plan you want to use.  Details and a video demo are included in the Bringing a Plan into Microsoft Teams post in the Microsoft Tech Community Planner Blog.