Forum Discussion
Emma Dong
Microsoft
MicrosoftNEW FEATURE: Team news authoring in the SharePoint mobile app for iOS
We are excited to announce team news authoring on the go using the SharePoint mobile app for iOS (version 2.1, released yesterday to the store)! You can add rich text, images from your phone, and documents from the site to your news post. Once published, the news post will show up immediately on your site, and people can view it both in the iOS app and on the web. For this first version, editing existing posts or saving drafts aren’t available via the iOS app. To edit an existing post, go to the team news experience on the web.
We are eager to have you give it a try and let us know how it works for you. Tell us how you use mobile news authoring, and how we can make this feature better and more useful moving forward.
Note: If you haven't seen the team news feature in your site, it hasn't rolled out to your organization yet. Stay tuned!
Mark-Kashman Andy Haon Nate Clinton Alina Skarbovsky
News articles are represented on the modern site using the image in the news page, but is it possible to hide that image in the news page, so that it is not visible in the actual "news item" but still represents the news item in the news web part on the modern site?
- Emma Dong
Hi Charlotte, thanks for the question! Currently, there is no way to configure the tiles in news rollup web part itself. There might be two workarounds to get closer to what you try to do:
Option 1 - instead of inserting the image as part of the content in the news article, use it as the title banner background image. This way, it will show up in the rollup, but more subtle than an image in the news body.
Option 2 - use hero web part to link to a news article. With hero web part, you can configure the tile image. However, this is a manual step so the rollup won't be updated when new news gets published.
Let me know if that answers your question! Add Alina Skarbovsky, PM for News all up for awareness of this ask.
Where was the actual announcement for this posted? Are we expected to visit each App Store or is their some other location that I don't know about?
- Emma Dong
Hi Dean,
This is a relatively small feature that we added to team news feature on the SharePoint mobile app for iOS, thus we don't have other announcements. We posted this update on tech community, tweeted via SharePoint handler on Twitter, and updated the iOS app store "what's new" text.
Does that answer your question? Are you looking for other channels to get this kind of updates?
The PowerBI team includes relatively small features in their monthly change log, see https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-desktop-latest-update/ and https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-mobile-whats-new-in-the-mobile-apps/.
I don't understand why the product teams have such widely varying approaches to providing information to their customers about changes to the products. It sure would be helpful if MS would make a concerted effort to assign the necessary resources to prepare the supporting documentation for each and every change that is deployed to all of the services available to O365 users. Some of the products have change logs, i.e., PowerBI and the Office Client products, but others do not. There should be a Change Log for every single service/license/app that can be accessed through a O365 account.
A couple questions/comments
1. When creating News, each news item creates a new Page on the associated SP site
- When that Site is created from a Group or Team, by default those pages are not exposed. Is there a method to display new News items on a main site page and not have to click through to Pages?
- News items are not displayed within the UI of the Group and there is no indicator that there is new News. Is there a way to get an entry into the Conversation component of the Group?
- Is there a way to bring "News" articles into the new Team app interface for the associated team? either as an entry in the Conversations or as a new tab called News
2. Notifications: the moble app notifies you that there a new News items.
- Do we now have to set up notifications on the library for users who are not using the mobile app?
- This goes double for users usingt Groups or Teams
3. Any Best Practice around creating a new Library of Pages called News?
- If you are alreading using the library "Pages" and now new items are coming in as News, this information can be incorrectly interspered within the library (and all of its assoviated views and filters). When creating "News" articles, would it be better for them to be created in a new, dedicated library?
4. What is the assumed permission of the library within the Site? Does it inherit the permissions of the Site? or does it set its own permissions based on assigned users to the Group (or Team or Yammer Channel, etc)?
- Emma Dong
Replied inline. Let me know if they make sense.
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A couple questions/comments
1. When creating News, each news item creates a new Page on the associated SP site
- When that Site is created from a Group or Team, by default those pages are not exposed. Is there a method to display new News items on a main site page and not have to click through to Pages?Good question. In either classic team site, or modern team site (every group gets a team site, which will be modern team site), you can add a modern page, and add "News headlines" or "News list" web part to the page. These two web parts will be querying the site's page library and display news posts available in the site, in reversed chronological order. As a matter of fact, newly created modern team site already has "News headlines" web part in the site home page, by default. It looks like this:
- News items are not displayed within the UI of the Group and there is no indicator that there is new News. Is there a way to get an entry into the Conversation component of the Group?By saying "Conversation component of the Group", I assume you mean the group conversations in Outlook's UI? We don't surface team contents there. As I mentioned above, you will get team news showing up out of box, when you go to the team site experience of your group. Let me know if you couldn't find it.
- Is there a way to bring "News" articles into the new Team app interface for the associated team? either as an entry in the Conversations or as a new tab called NewsWhat is "the new Team app" you are referring to? Microsoft Team? Assuming it is what you meant - we don't have immediate plan on surfacing news there yet, but we could definitely expand news surfacing area by allowing you to easily click and share to team conversations/discussions in the Microsoft Team app.
2. Notifications: the moble app notifies you that there a new News items.
- Do we now have to set up notifications on the library for users who are not using the mobile app?Currently, there is no notification capability when there is a new News item. We are working on the notification system for the app. Once it is done, users who use the mobile app will get notified when certain news items are published (we are working on the threshold and scenario here);and users who are not using the mobile app will likely need to be notified in other ways, e.g., via Email. We don't have a clear plan for the latter part yet.
- This goes double for users usingt Groups or TeamsNot sure what you mean by this.
3. Any Best Practice around creating a new Library of Pages called News?
- If you are alreading using the library "Pages" and now new items are coming in as News, this information can be incorrectly interspered within the library (and all of its assoviated views and filters). When creating "News" articles, would it be better for them to be created in a new, dedicated library?It is an intentional decision for us to have News items in the same library as other pages. We view news post as just another page, but with certain parameters that distinguish them from other pages so we can build UIs that only surface news items back. We are playing with the idea that in the future, maybe any page can be "marked" as news worthy, and get distributed through news UI. Thus, we don't go with having a separate library for news. It should not be hard for you to filter out news items in a page library, using values in specific columns. What is your scenario on making sure they are not mixed?
4. What is the assumed permission of the library within the Site? Does it inherit the permissions of the Site? or does it set its own permissions based on assigned users to the Group (or Team or Yammer Channel, etc)?
It inherits the permissions of the site, which will reflect assigned users to the Group, if it is a modern team site.
Alina Skarbovsky might have more insights to add here.
- Well to answer my own question....Item #1. Just what longer than 5 minutes. The "Home" page of the site changed. It now has News and Activity on it.
That was cool!
- When is it coming to Android App?
- Emma Dong
We are currently working on News consumption experience in Android. Should be ready Q1 2017. News authoring to follow after that.
Great to see this feature on iOS at the moment Emma Dong.
Looking forward to the news tab within SharePoint mobile on the other mobile platforms. I've added two ideas on the SharePoint UserVoice channel regarding the other mobile platforms:
- Gave it a try last night and today and it works well! Can't wait to have this on Windows Phone too :-)
