Forum Discussion
Possible appraochies we can follow to show a notification to users when a news page is created
Charlie Lee wrote:Just reading over this thread there are a number of mis-communications going on I think. So maybe its worth summarising a few elements for the benefit of John and others.
- The 'bell' icon is used by Microsoft to notify users of Office 365 related notifications (such as receipt of an email.) It is not to my knowledge customisable and has no API to allow you to insert a notification. News articles don't show up here when published.
- News articles, when published in SharePoint sites automatically send a push notification to users of the SharePoint mobile app, but only to the mobile app. There is no way (to my knowledge) you can see these notifications in the browser, other than to use the News web part on a SharePoint page.
- SharePoint Alerts are email based an thus not relevant in this case as the user wants to avoid email.
Given the further need to only show alerts for news within a certain category I would be looking at a customisation using the SharePoint Framework to achieve this requirement. Not sure if that is an option, but I think its the only way to achieve what you are looking for.
ok thanks for the clarifications. I were planning to convert/migrate our classic team site to be a Modern Team site, to be able to have "Notifications" under "Bill" icon showing notification when new pages that are linked to specific category are added. but what you are saying is that even on Modern Team sites, the "Notifications" under "Bill" icons will not support such a requirement?is this correct?
Correct - that very specific scenario would not be possible, but with customisation you could create a notification in these circumstances that would appear in the browser at the top of the page, but not under the O365 notifications area (the bell icon.) You would need someone with development experience to develop this customisation though.
If you would be happy having a 'latest news' section on the page itself then you could use the Highlighted Content web part to display news items based on your custom category property, which would partially meet your requirement at least without development.
Charlie Lee wrote:Correct - that very specific scenario would not be possible, but with customisation you could create a notification in these circumstances that would appear in the browser at the top of the page, but not under the O365 notifications area (the bell icon.) You would need someone with development experience to develop this customisation though.
If you would be happy having a 'latest news' section on the page itself then you could use the Highlighted Content web part to display news items based on your custom category property, which would partially meet your requirement at least without development.
i am actually a sharepoint developer :) but seems even with development knowledge we can not force a notification to be shown under the "bill" icon when news page which is linked to a specific term is added...
but not sure from a user perspective, who will this:-
Charlie Lee wrote:but with customisation you could create a notification in these circumstances that would appear in the browser at the top of the page, but not under the O365 notifications area (the bell icon.)
look like? notification at the top of the page?
It can look like anything you want assuming you can develop it!
The SharePoint Framework Starter Kit has an example for an 'alert' which is driven from a SharePoint list. You would need to consider the logic required to push an alert into this list based on a news article being published - possibly a Flow attached to the Site Pages library would suffice, if not there are plenty of other options to achieve this.
Perhaps try starting from the SPFx Starter Kit example and see where you get to:
https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-starter-kit/blob/master/documentation/components/ext-alert.md
