Managing Company News

In today’s fast-paced world, effective internal and external communication is crucial for organizations. SharePoint News provides a centralized platform to streamline news delivery and enhance collaboration. Join as we delve into the various features and capabilities of SharePoint News.

The Maturity Model

In relation to an organization’s news and the Maturity Model, an organization at the 100 level solely relies on email for news distribution. Level 200 introduces newsletters and aggregated information from different departments. Level 300 involves posting news-like content on the internet, though not necessarily in a single location. Level 400 signifies the establishment of a dedicated landing page for current news and historical records. Finally, level 500 focuses on measuring and improving news delivery.

SharePoint News Overview

SharePoint News offers a comprehensive solution for consolidating internal and external news. Users can create their own content or incorporate external links, including video news links. These news items can be combined into automatic or manual news digests, ensuring their visibility across various SharePoint locations. Starting from July 2023, SharePoint will roll out a feature that allows the delivery of a full page of news directly to recipients’ email inboxes. However, this feature is best suited for static news content rather than changing updates.

Organizational News

Organizational news allows organizations to highlight news from specific sites and provide more visual prominence for stories from that site. Visual cues can be utilized to signify the importance of certain news items over others. Making a site an organizational news site requires running one line of PowerShell and there is a limit of 250 organizational news sites per tenant.

Viva Connections feed

The Microsoft Viva Connections feed serves as a central location for news consumption. Although content authors cannot directly control the order of the feed, they can have influence. Influencing the feed is possible through features like boosting, promotions, and audience targeting.

Filtering News

To curate the news presented to users, SharePoint offers the news web part. Users can choose the news source from various locations in SharePoint. In addition to filtering by news source, the news web part allows filtering based on managed properties available as site columns in the site pages library. This enables complex compound filters using multiple managed property criteria.

Branding News Digests

For delivering highlighted news content to end users’ inboxes you can use the auto news digest feature. This allows customization of logo image, navigation bar, color text and icon, and accent color. However, the manual news digest lacks this customization. To achieve a more organization-specific look, we suggest you create a manual news digest, send it to yourself, edit it as you wish, and then forward it to others. This enables the removal of Microsoft and SharePoint logos and the creation of a personalized HTML email with relevant company branding.

PnP Modern Search for News

With PnP Modern Search, organizations can write custom queries to retrieve specific content types and promote news from designated sites. This feature is particularly useful when pulling data based on user profiles or implementing date range searches. Additionally, custom visualizations can be created using HTML handlebars templates, CSS, and/or the Adaptive Card framework.

Custom Visualizations

The combination of PnP Modern Search web part and custom HTML handlebar templates allows for highly tailored news visualizations. Organizations can even develop their own SharePoint Framework news web parts, offering greater control and flexibility.

Effective news management is essential for fostering collaboration and keeping employees informed. However, despite the simplicity of news, many organizations struggle to effectively implement sharing practices. SharePoint News provides a mature and versatile platform for centralizing news content, improving accessibility, and enhancing user engagement. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team if you have other questions on this topic!

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