Introducing new SharePoint news for email feature

Hi AndreeS,

I appreciate your perspective. From my 16 years of working in internal communications and intranets I would like to add two things:

1.  I do not believe that we are living in "the era of non internal email communication". Email very much still plays an important role in internal communications. Internal communicators need a good tool for internal mass emails in their distribution toolset.
2. This new feature gives internal communicators the opportunity to send out good-looking and trackable internal mass emails at no extra cost. The use cases go way way beyond the "news digest" feature. For many companies this new feature reasonably can replace existing internal mass email sending tools. This is a game changer and the enormous number of comments under this blog post shows that.

Regarding the problems with the custom page templates, I totally get the frustration (even though I personally am not using them because using that process leads to new pages being created at the site pages library root level which doesn't work for me at all). I do love the Microsoft Intelligent Intranet but this feeling of powerlessness when the PG decides to just do A, B, C or simply nothing without listening to their customers is the most frustrating thing about it by far.