The Announcements feature in the tools can be really handy for getting information out to users. The problem is it takes too long to reach each endpoint. I feel it should almost instantly get pushed to an endpoint if it's online like a configuration does if you deploy immediately. I understand there is the message box configuration, but it looks dated and the branding is nice to have in the announcement so it doesn't freak out users. The message box also doesn't push itself to the front, at least in my testing so the user won't even see it unless they notice the icon on their taskbar and click on it. 

With this whole Microsoft outage we wanted to inform our users quickly so they didn't clog up the the ticket queue or blow up the help desk line for something out of our control.