In-Product Message Suppression is Great, But No Way Exists to Control Irritating Teams Pop-up Messages

Sometimes the appearance of a notification in the Microsoft 365 message center is less understandable than the norm. Badly written message center notifications are not unknown, but usually the intent and meaning can be interpreted with a little effort.

MC989968 (28 January 2025) is different. I can’t understand why Microsoft published this notification because it seems to repeat MC808161 (3 July 2024). Both notifications cover the topic of a welcome setting in the Teams update management policy to suppress some in-product announcements of news and conferences.

MC989968 says “Some in-product messages in Microsoft Teams can now be controlled with the New-CsTeamsUpdateManagementPolicy command. Using this control, tenant admins can limit in-product messages relating to periodic What’s New and Conferences updates.” MC808161 is now offline, but as far as I can tell from the multiple sites that republish message center updates, that notification covers the same ground.

In passing, I wonder why so many people think that republishing message center updates is a valuable service to humanity. It seems like none add much value in terms of interpreting the information communicated by Microsoft, so what gets put online is no more than a mild form of plagiarism.

The Irritation of Teams Pop-up Messages

A frustrating aspect of Teams is its continuing insistence on displaying pop-up messages about every new tweak added to its feature set. Figure 1 is a collection of pop-up messages generated in a few minutes by navigating to the OneDrive, Calendar, and Planner apps. In the age of artificial intelligence, you’d imagine that Teams could learn about user preferences and adopt its behavior to match the way people work. A series of quick clicks to dismiss pop-ups should be sufficient evidence that I don’t want to see these annoying interruptions to my workflow.

While I appreciate that some like to be notified about the ongoing stream of new features and changes that appear in Teams, there should be some way to turn off pop-up messages. The Teams settings app covers many different categories of notifications from chats to channels to meetings, but there’s nothing available to allow users to decline seeing any product pop-ups. That seems to be a missed opportunity to please users.

After all, if Microsoft can dedicate effort to allowing users to decide where notifications should be located when using the Teams Windows desktop client (Figure 2). Surely it should be possible to construct a a similar setting to allow or suppress pop-ups?

However, I don’t think Microsoft will grant my wish. MC949959 (6 December 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 469491) says that being able to move meeting notifications to different screen locations will “make notifications more convenient and less disruptive, enhancing both focus and productivity.” I guess a similar rationale is needed to eradicate product pop-up messages and just saying that removing daily irritation won’t be enough.

Suppressing In-Product Messages

After seeing MC989968, I wondered if the Teams update policy that I updated when MC808161 appeared to suppress both what’s new and conference updates was still valid. Nothing has changed and the documentation for the New-CsTeamsUpdateManagementPolicy and Set-CsTeamsUpdateManagementPolicy cmdlets remains as before when it comes to manipulating the “campaign” categories of in-product messages to suppress. As a reminder, this code does the job for both What’s New and Conference (advertising) messages.

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

The Need to Remove Frustration

Nothing appears to have changed in the messaging, intent, or implementation of the content announced in MC808161 in July 2024 and MC989968 in January 2025. However, the latter did a service by reminding me that a Teams policy exists to control in-product messages. The ability to disable some categories of in-product messages is a good thing. It would be so much better if Teams went the extra yard to remove user frustration by introducing a setting to control the display of pop-up messages.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.