Microsoft Intune Organizational messages (preview)

At the moment of writing this blog post, Microsoft is rolling out a new feature to Microsoft Intune; Organizational messages. The feature is rolling out separately from the service release schedule and thus doesn’t hold itself to the enrollment order of APAC first, followed by EMEA etc. So if you don’t see the feature yet in your tenant, be patient, it will probably pop up soon!
The new feature is currently only supported on Windows 11 and if I understand it correctly only on Windows 11 22H2. No information is available from Microsoft if they are going to backport the feature to Windows 10.

Message types

Organizational messages are found in the Microsoft Intune portal under the Tenant admin section.

In the preview we have three types of messages available;
Taskbar messages
Notifications area messages
Get started app messages

Taskbar messages are messages which are shown on the user’s desktop just above the taskbar.
Currently, we can only choose one message theme as a taskbar message Mandatory update.

The second message type is the Notification area message, which is of course shown in the notification part of Windows.
For the notification message, we have multiple message themes available like Organizational HR training and Update device.

The third message type is Get started app message. This message is bigger compared to the other message types and is shown on the desktop of the user when the Get started app runs for the first time after a device is enrolled.

Four message areas are shown on the get started message, for two of these areas we can select a message out of preconfigured messages.

We need to provide every message type with a (company) logo. This shows our users the legitimacy of the message.

Configuring the messages

Configuring the messages is pretty straightforward. On the Message tab click Create.

On the right side of the page, we can select the message type and message theme.

The first thing to do is upload a company logo to the message. Make sure it has the right format and if possible a transparent background.
For a Get started app message the next thing to do is select two messages.
For this click Add your first message/ Add your second message.

On the right of the screen, we can make a choice on the preconfigured messages. And we need to select our domain and optionally we can add a link path.

At the bottom of this tab, we see a preview of our message.

On the next tab, we can configure the schedule when the message should be shown.
For this message type, we can only switch it to Always on.

The messages can only be assigned to All users or a user group, device targeting is not supported.

And as last we can review the message before we create it.

Creating a Taskbar message is almost the same as creating a Get started message. We currently can only select one message theme, but that might change in the future.

We need to upload the logo, select our domain and (optional) add a path link.
The biggest difference is you don’t have the option to select (two) messages. The popup is just to small to show a lot of text.

For this message type and the notification message type, we can select a schedule.
As we need to create the message 1 day prior to sending out the messages, we need to select the day of tomorrow or later for the First date to show the messages.

And on this tab, we select a Frequency.

If we have a look at creating the Notification area message, the only difference with the taskbar message is we have multiple message themes to select.

The preview of the message is shown with the text of the message theme.

After creating a few messages, these are shown on the message tab with their status.

End-user experience

And what does that look like for the end-user on the Windows 11 device?

The taskbar message is shown above the taskbar. We have a button to dismiss the message or to go to more details, which opens the browser with the configured domain (and link path).

The notification message is shown in the notification area and also allows you to get more information via the browser.

The Get started message is shown when the user first starts the Get started app.
It would be nice, if this organizational message is shown automatically after the users first sign into a new enrolled device, for example by automatically starting the Get started app.

Conclusion

This new feature seems to have a lot of potentials. The notifications look nice and it is very easy to set up. Especially the Get started notification could be of great benefit when providing a user with a new Windows machine, although I wasn’t able to test this message type yet.

But there are some things I would like to see get changed and added. I want to be able to change the preconfigured messages or create custom messages, so we can make use of the feature for any thing we can think of.
And I want to be able to send out these messages immediately and not with a delay of one day. For example, if there is a big outage which we should inform our users of as soon as possible, sending out such a message would be very helpful.

But this is just a feature released in the preview. Let us provide feedback to the Intune team, so they can make these a great feature!

Thanks for reading.