How do you Send an Email to notify a user whenever a new News Post is created in SharePoint Online site?Please help on how to do this. What are the ways.

Hi Mbryant705, sorry I realised I completely forgot to follow up on this post, so also apologies to everyone else involved in the thread. In a very simple Flow, I can send an email notification when a news item is published. There are a couple of things to be aware of:Site Pages won't normally appear in the list of libraries in the trigger, therefore you need to select "Enter a custom value" and then type in Site PagesThe published state of a document is held within a metadata field called "Promoted state". 1 = in Draft, 2 = Published. If it's a standard site page, not a news item, the Promoted state will be 0.I can create a condition so that if the Promoted state = 2 (News Item is published) then I can send an email to the required user(s). I can alternatively use the Flow actions to send out a push notification, send a message to Teams etc however you want to get your notification out. An example Flow is attached to this post. I hope that helps.

I'm probably too late to help anyone involved in the thread, however, for future users wondering how to solve this issue, here's how I did it.There is a metadata field known as version number. This number increments it's decimal component every time a draft is saved, the first draft will be saved as version 0.1, the next time you open the news page's draft, the auto-saves for that "session" will be saved as a version 0.2. The decimal will only go up once you save a "new" draft.Once you publish the news article, said version number changes to 1.0, if you were to edit the published article, those changes would be saved as version 1.1 (1.2 if you save it as a draft and keep editing it later on).If you then decide to republish the news article, its version number will update to 2.0.As far as i've seen, the pattern keeps going onNow back to the original question, to avoid resending emails for updated news articles we can simply add a second line to our condition that checks if the version number is exactly 1.0. This way our conditional block checks if the modified file is a published news page (thanks to the promoted state == 2 condition) AND if it's the first version being published (version == 1.0).NOTE: The "decimal" portion of the version number doesn't act like a decimal; in practice it works more like a second index annexed by a dot.The sequence of version numbers would go such as:0.1 < 0.2 < 0.3 < ... < 0.11 < 0.12 < ... < 0.21 < 1.0 < 1.1 ...I hope this helps any future lurkers.

Hi fvp11, I've blogged and vlogged it 🙂 https://youtu.be/24MgEZn6Y7c https://collab365.community/using-flow-sharepoint-news-notifications/ If you need any help, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Hi John Edward Paredes there are a number of ways that you could tackle this. You could create a Flow which has a trigger on the Site Pages library to send an email to a user/set of users to inform them that some activity has taken place. Alternatively, you could use the out-of-the-box Alerts mechanism as displayed in the attached screenshot. This way you can specify whether the alerts are sent out immediately, daily summary or weekly summary.

Hi KevinO1984 that's a great question and a good extension of what we've already done. As my trigger is "When a file is created or modified (properties only)" I'm able to see the properties of the page coming back. If I've used another trigger, I'll need to use the action "Get File Properties" to get the same info. There are two properties which I could use to add some more info to my email:Banner Image URLDescriptionBanner Image URL will take the image url of the image which I have assigned as the header of my news page. If I have no header, this field will be populated with the first image that it finds on the page. This is how the rollup image to the news web part works. You can take this URL and use it within HTML in our email. The Description takes the first paragraph from the news item, so again you can use this to add into your email. I don't think there's a native way of grabbing the entire news article from the properties as it doesn't get tagged as metadata, but I'll have a look to see if there are other options which we can explore.

How to Send an Email when added a News Post in SharePoint Online site

23 Replies

Zinaida
Copper Contributor
Jan 20, 2020
John Edward Paredes

Hello,

My question and current issue is- i am composing a sharepoint where i need to include a particular person to only receive email notification once i include their email as owner of the particular subject +add new template.

I can`t use alerts tab, as i do not want to alert all people using the sharepoint each time- just one person in particular, because those vary.

I created a column with settings to enter the email of a person, but when i include my email for testing- i receive no email.

I see as workaround only option is to "share" the subjected topic with a person. However, i am pretty sure that there should be a setting to send email to the person "assigned to" automatically.

This is in "new experience" view, column type is "People or Group".
- RobElliott
  Silver Contributor
  Jan 20, 2020
  Zinaida you can do this with a flow in Power Automate. The trigger would be a SharePoint "When an item is created or modified" trigger. You'd then have a condition that would check whether you'd added anything into the Owner column. If you hadn't then nothing would happen. But if you had entered the owner's email address in the Owner column then it would grab that and use it to send an email to the Owner with any other data you needed to send them.
  
  Rob
  Los Gallardos
  Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User
John_Sanders
Microsoft
Oct 23, 2018
If they use the SharePoint mobile app today (iOS or Android), they'll be notified of news posts by people they work closely with (powered by the graph).

We're also currently have notifications enabled for sites you follow within Microsoft (and will be rolling this out in the future to TR, then production).

We've built a feature to email people that don't have the mobile app installed if a notification "should" go to them (based on graph, site following, etc.) but we haven't yet figured out the right way to integrate that into the authoring process and create the right notification settings.

If you have thoughts on what you think the right experience is, we'd love to hear them. Thanks! fyi Debjani Mitra
Matt Weston
Iron Contributor
Oct 23, 2018
Hi John Edward Paredes there are a number of ways that you could tackle this. You could create a Flow which has a trigger on the Site Pages library to send an email to a user/set of users to inform them that some activity has taken place.

Alternatively, you could use the out-of-the-box Alerts mechanism as displayed in the attached screenshot. This way you can specify whether the alerts are sent out immediately, daily summary or weekly summary.
- pdang
  Copper Contributor
  Mar 12, 2019
  Matt Weston Hi Matt, The OOTB solution you provided is not helping. When I try to set an alert on News page, then I get alerted whenever changes are on News.aspx and it is published but not when there is any news post added. Am I missing something? How can I set an alert for myself/other users to get alerted on the News post releases? TIA.
  - Matt Weston
    Iron Contributor
    Mar 12, 2019
    Hi pdang , if you're looking for alerts when only when a news item is published then you're better off working with Microsoft Flow to achieve this. The OOTB method will send alerts when an item is added to the library regardless of whether it is published or not.
    
    I'll post an example Flow later today just in case you need it.
- Deleted
  Oct 28, 2018
  Flow would be my recommended way of solving this

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How to Send an Email when added a News Post in SharePoint Online site

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