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Important Message

A tenant-wide alert banner for when something actually matters. System outage, building closure, urgent policy change - the whole business sees it the moment they open any SharePoint page. Permission-controlled, severity-coded, dismissible, and optionally requiring acknowledgement for the alerts that really need to be read.

Important Message web part preview

The Problem

Something breaks, or something urgent happens, and you have no fast way to reach everyone. Email gets buried. A Teams message reaches the people already online. Publishing a news article takes too long, and half the business won't see it anyway because they don't visit the homepage that day. Critical information spreads by rumour.

The Solution

Important Message shows a prominent banner across the top of every SharePoint page in your tenant. Publish once, everyone sees it. Three severity levels so urgency reads at a glance. Dismissible so it goes away once read - and for the alerts that genuinely cannot be missed, you can require an explicit acknowledgement before the user continues.

See It in Action

Severity Levels and Acknowledgement

Important Message running on a real SharePoint tenant. Click any image to view full size.

What You Get

The fastest way to reach everyone when something urgent happens.

Three Severity Levels

Information (blue), Warning (amber) and Critical (red). Distinct colour coding so urgency reads at a glance - even for people who skim.

Tenant-Wide Visibility

Publish once, see it everywhere. Appears on every SharePoint page in the tenant automatically - no site-by-site deployment needed.

Permission-Controlled Publishing

Only authorised users can post alerts. Standard SharePoint permissions - typically internal comms, IT ops or a dedicated alerts security group.

Acknowledgement Required (Optional)

For alerts that absolutely must be read - safety notices, mandatory policy changes, regulatory updates - require an explicit acknowledgement click. Provides a record that every user has confirmed receipt.

Dismissible (When You Want)

Users dismiss once they've read it. Configurable per alert - you can force critical messages to remain visible until the issue is resolved.

Start and End Dates

Schedule alerts to appear and disappear automatically. Perfect for planned maintenance windows - no one forgets to take the message down afterwards.

Optional Link for Detail

Attach a link to a status page, full article or incident report for users who need more detail than the banner provides.

Questions About Important Message

Can multiple messages be active at the same time?

Yes. Multiple active alerts stack in order of severity with Critical first. We'd recommend keeping it to one or two active at a time though - banner blindness is real, and the whole point of Important Message is that it gets noticed.

Who can publish alerts?

Anyone with edit permissions on the underlying SharePoint list. You control this through standard SharePoint permissions - typically a "Comms" or "Alerts" security group so there's no single bottleneck in an incident, but the list is still tightly controlled.

When should we use acknowledgement-required versus dismissible?

Use dismissible for the majority of alerts - outages, building updates, general announcements. Use acknowledgement-required for the alerts where you genuinely need a record that every user has read it: safety notices, mandatory policy changes, regulatory or legal updates, and major contractual changes. Acknowledgement is intentionally more friction-heavy, so saving it for the moments that really matter keeps it effective.

How is this different from Scrolling Notice?

Important Message is for urgent, tenant-wide alerts: system outages, emergencies, critical policy changes. It appears on every SharePoint page in the tenant. Scrolling Notice (Complete bundle only) is for lighter-weight page-level announcements: social events, canteen menus, reminders. Use both together - one for the things that matter, one for the everyday chatter.

Does it work inside Microsoft Teams?

Yes. When a SharePoint page is embedded as a tab in Teams, Important Message renders at the top of the page with the same severity styling and dismiss behaviour as the desktop browser experience.

What about data protection and compliance?

All alerts live in your own Microsoft 365 tenant's SharePoint list. Nothing leaves your tenant, no external services are called. Dismiss state and acknowledgement records are stored within your tenant. Security documentation is available for your IT governance review.

Never Let Critical Information Spread by Rumour

Book a 30-minute demo to see Important Message running on a real SharePoint tenant, or explore the bundles.