Stop Annoying In-Product Messages Promoting Events and What’s New Updates

Just as Microsoft settled into the normal stupor surrounding the July 4 holiday, the Teams development group issued message center notification MC808161 (3 July 2024) to announce a new policy setting to disable some in-product messages displayed in Teams clients. The new setting is something that should have been in place when Microsoft started to push in-product messages to promote events like the Microsoft 365 conference (Figure 1) in April 2023, but it’s better later than never.

A Really Bad Idea

I hated in-product messages the first time I saw them. To me, Microsoft has no right to communicate with users belonging to my tenant and no right to advise users what training events they might like to attend. It’s one thing to pump ads to consumers of a free service and quite another to do the same (which is what in-product messages are) to people who pay a monthly license fee.

Advertising conferences chosen simply because events align with Microsoft marketing priorities is simply an abuse of Microsoft’s position as a cloud service provider and adds weight to the argument that Microsoft should be restrained by government intervention. Some will wonder if the latest European Union investigation into anti-competitive behavior around Teams prompted Microsoft to act. I don’t think so because controls over in-product messages were discussed by Microsoft last year in response to complaints from many MVPs.

Squashing In-Product Messages

Applying the policy block for in-product messages can only be done using PowerShell. The instructions to control in-product messages mention the New-CsTeamsUpdateManagementPolicy cmdlet from the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module (I used version 6.3). This implies that you need to create a new policy. You don’t. There should be an existing policy in place that can be updated.

Looking at the DisabledInProductMessages parameter with PowerShell, it seems to be an array. The documentation implies that the parameter takes a string value and that only a single type of in-product message can be disabled. In short, you must choose either:

• 91382d07-8b89-444c-bbcb-cfe43133af33: What’s New Messages
• edf2633e-9827-44de-b34c-8b8b9717e84c: Conferences

However, the Set–CsTeamsUpdateManagementPolicy cmdlet is quite happy to accept an array containing both values. Here’s what I ran to update the default update management policy with both values:

[array]$DisabledMessages = "edf2633e-9827-44de-b34c-8b8b9717e84c", "91382d07-8b89-444c-bbcb-cfe43133af33"
Set-CsTeamsUpdateManagementPolicy -Identity Global -DisabledInProductMessages $DisabledMessages
Get-CsTeamsUpdateManagementPolicy -Identity Global
Identity                  : Global
DisabledInProductMessages : {edf2633e-9827-44de-b34c-8b8b9717e84c, 91382d07-8b89-444c-bbcb-cfe43133af33}

PowerShell documentation has been known to be incorrect in the past, and it seems like this is the way the cmdlet is designed to work. In any case, my tenant is configured as shown above and I look forward to peace from annoying ad placements about both conferences and what’s new messages.

Only for Teams

The policy settings only cover Teams clients. Other products take their own course, as evident in the example of the Power Platform admin center and the two ads placed for the Power Platform community conference (Figure 2).

Let’s hope that the Power BI and any other development group that’s tempted to abuse their customers follow the lead set by Teams and provide tenants with a method to eradicate in-product messages.

Getting in the Way of Work

In-product messages get in the way of useful work. People are distracted by whatever message is being relayed. That’s a direct impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of customer organizations inflicted by Microsoft without invitation or permission.

A better way to promote conferences is to use the Microsoft 365 message center and allow tenant administrators to decide what information to pass on within their organization. This approach might not get messages in front of as many “eyeballs,” but it does offer the advantage of not making people unhappy when they see blatant advertising that doesn’t add a jot of value.

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In-Product Messaging Highlights Microsoft 365 Conference in Las Vegas

Ever since the earliest days of Office 365, Microsoft has assured customers that they control the data in their tenant. Largely, I think Microsoft has respected that aspiration, but there have been times when Microsoft product managers feel the need to reach out to end users. That’s just not right. Communicating with tenant administrators is fine, but Microsoft should only ever communicate with the people who work in an organization and use the services available to a tenant with the explicit approval of that organization.

The latest example is in-product messaging featuring ads for conferences, which I encountered yesterday when editing a SharePoint Online page. A notification popped up to tell me that I should expand my SharePoint skills by learning from experts at the Microsoft 365 conference in Las Vegas in May (Figure 1). I’m not sure if this was an A/B kind of feature test but I know that many other people suffered the same interruption.

I also don’t know if this kind of thing will happen in other Microsoft 365 web applications like OWA, Planner, and Viva Engage.

Many Things Wrong with In-Product Messaging

There are so many things that are wrong here. For instance:

• No notification appeared in the Microsoft 365 admin center to inform administrators that these notifications would appear. The experience seems like a large-scale experiment to see how people will react to in-product ads.
• Microsoft shouldn’t disrupt user workflow with unnecessary and unwanted notifications. Microsoft talks about removing friction from its apps and reducing context switches to allow people to work better. Popping up useless and unwanted notifications is distracting and intrusive.
• People pay for Microsoft 365 as an enterprise app. Microsoft 365 is not a consumer app funded by advertising.
• Blasting out notifications without administrator oversight (where’s the control in the Microsoft 365 admin center to block these ads?) might be considered to infringe user privacy.
• Telling someone who works in Ireland about a conference in Las Vegas next month seems like a no-op. There’s very little trace of artificial intelligence and Microsoft’s famed telemetry here. I imagine that 99.9999% of the people who saw this pop-up have neither the budget nor the interest to go to a conference in Las Vegas, even if it is wall to wall with “experts.”

The only saving grace is that the link in the notification didn’t take the user to a portal to buy a conference ticket. Instead, it opened Microsoft’s post about their conference guide. Things could have been worse.

[Update: If you don’t like what Microsoft is doing with in-product ads, please upvote this feature request for SharePoint]

Why The Microsoft 365 Conference

I don’t understand why Microsoft tested in-product messaging with an ad for a third-party conference. The only reason I can think of is that Microsoft heavily invests in the Microsoft 365 conference with direct sponsorship payments and providing speakers for keynotes and sessions. In addition, the conference is coming up soon, so a certain rationale exists that this event was a good one to test.

I personally don’t like the Microsoft 365 conference very much because I think it focuses too heavily on certain parts of the ecosystem (like SharePoint and Teams) and focuses too much on new features. For instance, if you attend the conference, you’ll hear a lot about Microsoft 365 Copilot, the Loop application, the Viva suite, and the new Teams client. That’s all very well and the content satisfies the need for many in the technical community, but the coverage of Exchange Online (the largest workload in Microsoft 365) and Azure AD (the underpinning of all authentication in Microsoft 365) is poor. I think other conferences, like the European SharePoint, Office 365, and Azure Conference or The Experts Conference achieve better balance in their coverage of Microsoft 365 technology.

What’s Next?

I hope Microsoft decides that in-product messaging is a horrible idea for Microsoft 365. I hope that customers tell Microsoft that they hate pop-ups about random conferences or anything else. I don’t want to be interrupted with “important messages” about random happenings as I work in Microsoft 365 browser apps. Life has quite enough interruptions without software surfacing more unnecessary distractions.