How we designed and built Centriq — a multi-tenant SaaS platform that turns Microsoft's raw update feed into curated, compliance-ready intelligence for IT teams.
Every Microsoft 365 administrator opens the same inbox of chaos. Hundreds of Message Center announcements arrive each year — feature rollouts, deprecations, security policies, breaking changes. Keeping up with them is a part-time job for a single tenant, and an impossibility for anyone managing several. Our client knew this problem intimately, and asked us to solve it. This is the story of how we built Centriq.
The brief: editorial judgement, layered onto a live feed
The premise was simple. The raw Microsoft 365 Message Center feed needed a layer of human judgement on top — a way to triage, tag, and sign off on every announcement before passing it to end-users in a form they could actually act on. The client had the editorial expertise. What they needed was the product.
We were asked to design and build it from scratch: a multi-tenant SaaS platform that connects to Microsoft Graph, pulls the live Message Center feed, and gives a dedicated editorial team a workspace to enrich each announcement with a Traffic Light rating, smart tags, custom compliance assessments, and supporting documentation. End-customers — the IT teams inside the tenants — log in and see a personalised, prioritised view of only what matters to their organisation.
The Message Center isn't the problem. The signal-to-noise ratio is. Centriq is the editorial layer the feed was always missing. Project brief, kick-off workshop
The public surface
A SaaS product lives or dies on its first impression. We worked on positioning before pixels: Centriq is for Microsoft 365 administrators, it solves a problem they already feel, and it delivers a calm, structured workflow on top of a stressful daily feed. The public site reflects that — direct, confident, and weighted toward the product itself rather than abstract promises.
Behind the homepage sit a detailed features page, a transparent pricing structure with three subscription tiers (Basic at €99/month, Professional at €199/month, Enterprise at €299/month), and a contact path. Pricing is shown in euros, plans differ by concurrent-login caps, history depth, and access to advanced content like contract templates and the "News Time" feed. Every public page is bilingual — English and German — and switches with a single click.
Inside the customer workspace
Once an administrator signs in, the marketing language disappears entirely. Centriq becomes a workspace. The dashboard greets the user by name, shows the current date, and presents today's announcements grouped by impact level: Critical, Warning, Informational. Each item carries its Traffic Light, its smart tags, its Microsoft message ID, and a one-click path into the full Message Center view.
Beyond the dashboard, users have full access to the Message Center archive, a favourites system for pinning critical announcements, downloadable contracts and concept documents, and — for Enterprise customers — the "News Time" stream of curated industry analysis. Every page adapts gracefully to the user's plan tier, hiding features they don't have access to rather than teasing them with locked icons.
The admin operations console
The customer workspace is what gets shown to prospects, but the admin backend is where Centriq earns its keep. Every customer, every subscription, every Message Center announcement, every uploaded contract is managed through a single structured operations console. The editorial team opens the Message Center workflow first thing in the morning, reviews the previous night's Graph sync, assigns Traffic Light ratings, applies tags, attaches assessments, and publishes. By the time customers sign in, the day's announcements are already curated.
Customer Management opens a full Customer 360 view for any tenant: registration date, plan, billing cycle, status, primary contact. Suspended, paused, and pending-deletion accounts are surfaced clearly so nothing falls through the cracks. Subscription tiers, pricing rules, terms & conditions, privacy policies, and About content are all editable through the same backend, with a complete GDPR audit log behind every change.
Under the hood: trust through observability
A SaaS platform that touches customer Microsoft 365 environments has to be trustworthy in two directions: it has to be technically reliable, and it has to be visibly so. We built a dedicated System Health page into the admin backend that surfaces the live status of every Microsoft Graph scope, response times measured in milliseconds, the Azure SQL database's tier and DTU consumption, latency, active connections, and the timestamp of the last backup. When something is wrong, the team knows before any customer does.
What we delivered
- Multi-tenant architecture Every customer gets a fully isolated environment. No shared state, no cross-tenant data leakage.
- Native Microsoft 365 authentication OAuth2 against Microsoft Graph. Users sign in with the credentials they already use every day.
- Two-tier role model Tenant Admin and Member roles with granular per-feature permissions, built in from day one.
- Compliance-ready workflow Custom assessment forms, risk ratings, remediation notes, and sign-off trails for every announcement.
- Three-tier subscription billing Basic, Professional, and Enterprise — with concurrent-login caps, history limits, and downloadable documents toggled from the admin backend.
- Bilingual, EU-compliant from launch English and German throughout, GDPR audit logging, and data residency in West Europe.
The outcome
Centriq launched as a fully featured product, not an MVP. The platform shipped with all three subscription tiers, complete bilingual support, role-based access control, and a thirteen-module admin operations console. Within months of go-live, more than five hundred IT administrators were relying on it daily to manage Microsoft 365 updates across their tenants.
More importantly, the daily experience changed. The Layer 1 editorial team now opens one workspace each morning instead of three tabs and a shared spreadsheet. The Layer 2 customers — the IT admins inside Contoso, Fabrikam, Proseware, and the rest — finally have a single, calm view of what is actually happening to their Microsoft 365 environment this week. Critical items receive critical attention. Informational items no longer generate Slack threads at two in the morning. Compliance trails write themselves.
We didn't build a tool. We built the editorial layer the Microsoft 365 Message Center always needed — and we built it as a real product on day one. Project retrospective
About this engagement. We designed and built Centriq end-to-end — from positioning and pricing strategy through full-stack engineering, Microsoft Graph integration, and the admin operations backend.
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