Microsoft and Relevance
When issuing an item to the Message Center, Microsoft rates the the relevance as 'High', 'Medium' or 'Low'. This is calculated by the number of active users of the service being changed, but does not consider the adoption of the feature impacted by the change, nor whether the change impacts IT administrators or the experience or usability for end users.
The recommendation Microsoft provides is based on multiple factors such as:
- Apps and service usage
- Changes meant to prevent or fix issues for subscription
- Changes meant to help you plan ahead or stay informed
- Impact changes, such as data privacy and app and service retirements
ChangePilot Impact Scoring
Customers using ChangePilot will receive Message Center items rated by impact to both IT Administrators and end users within their organisation.
Organisations can use these ratings to decide who is best placed to take ownership and any action of the change. For example, as is typical for cloud services, a new major feature might be launching with no option to disable by IT administrators. This will be 'Low' impact for admins, but 'High' for users. There is no action required by admins, but service owners will need to consider the communications, training and support for their users to minimise disruption and maximise adoption.
The definitions and rationale of each impact score are:
| User Impact | Admin Impact |
| 🟢 Low User Impact: No impact on typical use cases for the user. | 🟢 Low Admin Impact: No option for admins to configure, control or influence the change. |
| 🟠 Medium User Impact: Typical new features. | 🟠 Medium Admin Impact: Can be configured, but default behaviour is acceptable for most customers. |
| 🔴 High User Impact: Changes the experience of an app, service or product in a meaningful way E.g. new user interface, new client, meaningful new feature, a new service or feature retirement. | 🔴 High Admin Impact: New configuration option, new product or service. |
The impact given isn't tenant or organisation specific, yet assumes use of the service. Remember, you only receive Message Center items via ChangePilot relevant to your tenant, geography and license types, so if you receive a message, someone in your organisation will be affected.
That said, when the item is received by your Microsoft List (ChangeTracker), it is possible to manually change the impact rating if you perceive the actual impact to be higher or lower than that rated by us. To manually change either impact rating of an item, open up the item from your Microsoft List (ChangeTracker) and toggle the status.
The final thing to remember is that impact is only a recommendation, not an indicator of wether or not to review or take action against an item. Best practice is to review all changes coming from the Message Center and Roadmap via ChangePilot.