We are excited to announce that we are currently rolling out a new feature called SharePoint News for Email. This feature enables you to convert your SharePoint News Posts intro distributi...
Great first version of this feature but there is lots of room to grow and I hope Microsoft addresses the following points (and the great questions already posted here):
Liking or commenting a SharePoint news from Outlook doesn't seem to work yet (in contrast to mails from Viva Engage where you can interact with a post within Outlook). This is so important. As it is currently this would cost a lot of potential engagement.
Sharing multilingual news is problematic:
If you work with language versions, you seemingly need to manually send each language version to a separate distribution group for each language. Lots of extra work and error potential.
If you put all languages on one page, you can't put an anchor link to the different languages at the top of the page because anchor links don't work.
If you have a video embedded in the news, you can't play it within Outlook. Please give us inline playback for videos.
Having this sharing feature only available for news is unnecessarily limiting: There are definitely use cases for sharing normal/content pages via email.
Too few web parts are available. There are so many web parts that would add value to these news:
Viva Engage web part: Integrate a post from an executive or project lead into a SharePoint news to generate engagement and steer employees to Viva Engage.
Forms: Integrate surveys into SharePoint news that can be filled out within Outlook. Newsletter solutions like PoliteMail can do this.
Highlighted Content: Build sophisticated personalized newsletters instead of having to manually build separate ones for each audience.
Image Gallery: Integrate images from events and such.
Countdown Timer: Count down to an important event.
...
Audience targeting is not supported. Think of the great things you could do with audience targeting, e.g. personalized newsletters.
You only see the template picker when you create the news from the homepage which in turn creates the page on the root level of the site. This is not feasible because nobody wants to have all pages on the site's root level. If you are working with folders in the site pages library (e.g. News/2023) you need to manually copy the email draft and then delete the original. Lots of extra work.
Bugs that I noticed:
In the quick links web part you can enable audience targeting but it's not applied correctly when the email is opened in Outlook. See the following screenshot: In the first quick links web part the quick link is set to an audience that I'm not part of. The quick link's name is not rendered but the icon is shown and is clickable. Second quick link web part without audience targeting for comparison.
The quick links web part in Outlook doesn't look anywhere the same as it does in SharePoint itself. Left: Outlook. Right: SharePoint.
Anchor links don't work (even though they are part of the template "Topic").
This screenshot from the documentation is not how it looks in my tenant. The location of the Share button is different:
In the template picker the email icon is not in the same place for templates from Microsoft and for custom templates based on the Microsoft templates.
Microsoft