Organizational Messages is one of those features that often flies under the radar in many organizations. It lives quietly in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, a bit “badly” placed under the reporting function, yet it can be one of the most effective ways to reach users at the right moment, directly in their flow of work.
This guide is meant to be practical. The goal is to help you understand when to use Organizational Messages, how the different message types work, what to think about before publishing anything to end users, and what you need to have in place before you can use it.
What is Organizational Messages?
Organizational Messages let you send targeted, branded messages directly to users on Windows devices and in Microsoft Teams. These messages are native to the platform. They are not emails, well, they weren’t, but we will get to that later on, and they are not chat messages.
The Organizational messages appears where users already are. On the lock screen, on the desktop, in the taskbar, or inside Teams. This makes the feature especially useful for adoption, awareness, and time sensitive communication.
All messages are managed centrally from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and are targeted to the recipients.
Microsoft introduced the feature in public preview in early 2024 with a focus on new ways to communicate directly with users inside Windows and Microsoft 365 rather than relying on email.
Organizational Messages are evolving
Before diving into configuration, it is worth calling out that Organizational Messages is actively evolving.
The Microsoft 365 Roadmap shows several new capabilities currently rolling out as previews, with general availability planned for spring 2026. The additions are:
• Support for Email delivery
• Support for Action Segments
• Support for Hybrid joined devices
Email delivery will make it possible to reach users even when they are not signed in on a Windows device.
Action Segments introduce more granular targeting and interaction models. In the current preview, this includes segments such as “Inactive Copilot Users” and “Inactive Copilot Users in Teams“.
Hybrid joined device support will close an important gap for organizations that are not yet fully cloud joined.
Licensing and prerequisites
Licensing must be in place before anything else will work.
Organizational Messages require Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 together with Windows 10 or Windows 11 Enterprise. This means that the feature is not available to organizations using Microsoft 365 Business licenses. In practice Organizational Messages is positioned as an enterprise level communication capability and is only accessible in tenants that meet those licensing requirements.
From a device perspective, users must be signed in on supported Windows devices. Devices must be Azure AD joined. Hybrid Azure AD joined devices are currently supported in preview, with general availability planned for early 2026.
If your organization manages devices with Microsoft Intune, which is common in most environments, delivery is also affected by Intune policy configurations. This is an area where things often go wrong.
Intune policy requirements for Organizational Messages
When Microsoft Intune is used to manage devices, delivery of Organizational Messages is controlled by specific policies. If these policies are not configured correctly, messages will be blocked even if everything looks correct in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. This is especially important if you are using Intune security baselines or restrictive configuration profiles.
There are certain policies that explicitly allow or block Organizational Messages. These must be configured intentionally as they are disabled by default as detailed in this Learn article.
When using the Settings catalog, review the Experience category in a new or existing Windows configuration profile and ensure the following settings are configured.
The following settings must be enabled or allowed:
• Allow Windows Spotlight (User)
• Allow Windows Spotlight on Action Center (User)
• Allow Windows Tips
• Configure Windows Spotlight on Lock Screen (User)
• Enable delivery of organizational messages (User)
The following setting must not be enabled:
• Disable Cloud Optimized Content
If you are using the Windows MDM security baseline, additional settings are required.
Several baseline policies control both Organizational Messages created by your organization and messages coming directly from Microsoft. To allow Organizational Messages the required baseline policies must be set to Not configured. If you want to continue blocking messages coming directly from Microsoft while allowing your own Organizational Messages, this is handled separately using the Microsoft messages policy found in the Organizational Messages settings experience within the admin center.
Who can send messages?
As always, the Global Admin can do everything, but that is not really a role anyone should use on a daily basis. There are two specific roles made available in Microsoft 365 to manage this service. The two roles and their rights are as follows:
- Organizational Messages Writer
- Create new Organizational Messages
- Write and edit message content
- Configure targeting, timing, and delivery surfaces
- Submit messages for approval
Writers cannot publish messages. Their work always stops at submission. This ensures that message creation is separated from the final decision to communicate with employees. Well, in all honesty, they can publish certain premade templates for, as an example, adoption cases, but nothing custom or urgant.
- Organizational Messages Approver
- Review submitted messages
- Reject messages, with a mandatory comment to the writer
- Approve and publish messages
Approvers do not create content themselves. Their role is to validate tone, accuracy, timing, and relevance before anything reaches users.
The same person can hold both roles, but they can never approve their own messages to reduce the risk of misstakes and prevent missuse of a high visibility channel. This adds a certain amount of governance and compliance to the feature. With this in mind, define who is allowed to send Organizational Messages. Align usage with internal communications. Document when each delivery surface should be used and treat this feature as a shared responsibility between IT and communications rather than a purely technical tool.
Delivery surfaces and when to use them
Organizational Messages can be delivered through several different surfaces. Each one has a different impact on the user experience and should be used intentionally.
Taskbar and Windows notifications
Messages delivered through notifications or the taskbar are still highly visible, but less disruptive than Spotlight.
These work well for time sensitive updates, short reminders, or operational messages that users need to notice during the day.
This surface is often a good middle ground when Spotlight feels too strong, but Teams feels too easy to miss.
Microsoft Teams (Teaching popover)
Teams delivery places the message inside the collaboration tool where many users already spend a large part of their workday. You have all seen the purple bubble in the top right corner showing some new feature.
This surface is well suited for feature rollouts, guidance, and adoption related communication. Messages here feel more conversational and less intrusive, which makes them ideal for change management.
Windows Spotlight
Windows Spotlight messages appear on the lock screen or desktop background experience. This is the most visible and also the most intrusive option. This is the first thing your users see when they start their computer.
Typical use cases include important awareness messages, security reminders, and adoption nudges that benefit from repetition. Maybe even a push for an internal event to hype it.
When using Spotlight, keep the message short and clear. Focus on one message and one action. Avoid technical language and avoid using this surface too frequently. Spotlight works best when users trust that it only appears for things that matter.
In all cases you can use either custom messages or the premade templates that are made available from Microsoft.
Targeting
Messages can be targeted in a few different way whereof Entra ID groups is the most common scenario. In addition to targeting messages with Entra ID groups, Organizational Messages also support more advanced targeting based on organizational attributes such as Companies, Departments, and Locations.
These options appear in the Recipients step of the message creation flow but they are not enabled by default. When they are missing, it is usually not a licensing issue. It is a configuration issue. The advanced targeting options are powered by group level aggregate insights from Adoption Score. In simple terms, Organizational Messages reuse the same aggregated organizational data that Adoption Score uses to understand how features are adopted across different parts of the organization.
Because of this dependency, advanced targeting must be explicitly enabled in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
The latest adition now in Preview, as mentioned above, is targeting with Action Segments. Today only for “Inactive Copilot Users” and “Inactive Copilot Users in Teams“. These two are great for creating adoption Organizational Messages to push adoption of Copilot.
Scheduling Organizational Messages
Organizational Messages are not meant to live forever. Scheduling is a core part of using the feature correctly and should always be configured.
When creating a message, you need to define when it becomes active and when it should stop being shown. During this time window, the message is eligible for delivery to the targeted users and devices.
Start and end dates
Each message has a start date and an end date.
The start date defines when the message becomes active and can begin appearing for users. This is useful when coordinating communication with feature rollouts, planned maintenance, or internal announcements.
The end date defines when the message expires. Once the end date is reached, the message is no longer delivered, even if users have not seen it.
Setting a realistic end date is important. Messages without a clear lifecycle quickly turn into background noise and make it harder to understand if the message is still relevant.
Frequency and visibility
Organizational Messages are not shown continuously. The platform controls how often a message is displayed to avoid overwhelming users.
This means you should not try to compensate by extending the schedule unnecessarily. Instead, keep the active window aligned with how long the information is actually relevant.
For example:
• An adoption message might run for two to three weeks
• An operational reminder might run for a few days
• An urgent message should run for the shortest possible time
Coordinating multiple messages
Scheduling becomes especially important when multiple messages are active at the same time.
Avoid overlapping too many messages, especially on high visibility surfaces such as Windows Spotlight. If several messages compete for attention, none of them will be effective.
It is a good practice to review active and upcoming messages regularly and treat Organizational Messages as a shared communication calendar rather than isolated tasks.
Wrap up
Organizational Messages are a powerful but often overlooked part of Microsoft 365. Used correctly they let you reach users where work actually happens without adding more noise to already full inboxes.
With clear targeting, the right delivery surface, sensible scheduling, and solid governance you can make the difference between helpful communication and background clutter. If you are already running Microsoft 365 E3 or E5, this is a capability worth spending time on. Start small, learn how your users respond, and build from there.
I am curious how others are using Organizational Messages in their tenants. What works well, what does not, and what lessons have you learned so far?
