ANNOUNCEMENT | SharePoint home in Office 365 and team news updates across Web and mobile
Published Mar 07 2017 09:03 AM 51.2K Views
Microsoft

Extra, extra, read all about it! Lots of news on team news. Improve the reach of your internal communications – to individuals, the team and throughout the company. SharePoint Online promotes efficient and effective collaboration and communication throughout your intranet. When you have news to share, it should be easy to author with powerful methods of distribution and consumption for the greatest impact. Today, we’re pleased to highlight several new SharePoint capabilities in Office 365 that help you inform and stay on task in a very personal way:

 

  • News on SharePoint home in Office 365 | personalized team news rollup from across sites you are active in, sites you are following, and other news suggested by Microsoft Graph, right on the main entry point for all your sites and portals.
  • News in SharePoint mobile app for Android | personalized team news rollup on your Android device. [Already on iOS, coming soon to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app]
  • Create news with the SharePoint mobile app for iOS | author news and publish to your team members while you’re on the go. [Coming next to Android]
  • Create impactful news and pages | new web parts and page capabilities to help strengthen your internal communications and add interactivity.

 

Let’s dive into the details.

News on SharePoint home in Office 365

Improve the consumption of your news. Microsoft enables a personalized view of all team news published to users right on their SharePoint home in Office 365 (click the SharePoint tile within the Office 365 app launcher). News is easy to read from across the sites they are active in, sites they follow, as well as other news suggested by the intelligence of Microsoft Graph.

 

At the top of SharePoint home, you will now see News from sites. It’s easy to see what the news is, where it’s coming from, how it’s trending – and you’re one-click away from reading the article in it full fidelity, no matter what operating system or browser you are using. And to see all your news, simply click See all to go to the dedicated, personalized news rollup page.

 

SharePoint home with team news.jpg

News from sites now appears at the top of SharePoint home in Office 365

 

With the addition of team news, SharePoint home evolves into an intuitive, single location to see what's happening in all your sites and portals, perform enterprise-wide search, create new sites -- and now read all the news around you.

 

Learn more about how to find news, sites and portals in Office 365.

News in SharePoint mobile app for Android

A rollup of news on the Web is great. Now what about news in your pocket while you’re on the go? If you use the SharePoint mobile app for Android, you will now have the mobile experience of team news. When you tap the News tab, you will see a list of news tailored to you using the intelligence of Microsoft Graph. Viewing news on the SharePoint mobile app for iOS has been available for a few months now to great reviews and ratings. Now, SharePoint mobile on Android will give you one place to catch up on the news from across your intranet. That’s your news in your pocket!

 

View news on SP app Android.jpg

Within the SharePoint mobile app for Android | the News tab (left), viewing a news article (center), and news on a team site (right).

 

Install the SharePoint mobile app for Android today, and learn how it helps you keep connected to all things collaboration and communication. [The news tab will come soon to the SharePoint app for Windows 10 Mobile]

Create news with the SharePoint mobile app for iOS

The next level of the news service within the SharePoint app is to enable the creation of news on the go. Now you can add your own news stories right from your iOS device. Simply click + Add from the News section on a team site, type a title, add body text and format it. You can also add image(s) and embed documents. And then click Publish. You and your peers will see the story appear across the news service as a recent story – on SharePoint home in Office 365, within the personalized News tab of the SharePoint apps, and on the team site itself. That’s news reach – ensuring you have an effective, automated megaphone to amplify your news.

 

Create news on SP app iOS.jpg

With the SharePoint mobile app for iOS | create news (left), add text and documents (center), and add images and format text (right).

 

Install the SharePoint mobile app for iOS today, and learn more about team news in the SharePoint mobile app for iOS (view and create news on the go).

Create impactful news and pages

Your messages need a canvas with which to author--one that is as flexible, powerful and interactive as the information you need to get out to the company. Where you author pages and news adjusts to the needs of your message, provides a great experience across Web and mobile by default, so you can create rich, dynamic communications that inform with impact. We have added new capabilities to this authoring canvas with both new web parts and improved usability.

 

New modern web parts

Web parts are the building blocks of pages and team news. They allow you to do things as simple as placing text on a page, to embedding a document or video, to displaying a roll-up of documents or data insights.

 

Here is a list of recently released web parts that can be used on a modern team site home page, in a page and in team news:

  • Power BI (preview) | include dynamic, visual data in your page or news article. Simply paste a URL to an existing Power BI report and the interactive data flows in context for your reader.
  • Link | share links to external and internal pages and documents. The Link web part shows a preview -- with image, title and text snippet; no more blue links.
  • Image Gallery | share collections of pictures on a page using a tile or carousel layout.
  • Bing Maps | add a map to your page. Simply enter an address or a well-known location name, and your map dynamically appears.
  • Quick Chart | create a simple chart to present data. Enter your data points with labels, pick your chart type, and publish.

 Authoring toolbox - new web parts.jpg

The authoring toolbox showing all in-production web parts (accessible in Edit mode when you hover between web parts; newest additions highlighted in red boxes).

 

Review the up-to-date list of all available web parts, and how to use them in your internal communications. And if you are a developer, review how you can get started with the SharePoint Framework to build your own custom web parts.

 

Paste tables from Word, intact

Often, we have information in one location, and we want to simply copy and paste it as-is into a new place. Text is historically easy and straight forward. But a table within Microsoft Word – challenging to maintain the original fidelity into other applications. A recent update now enables you to copy and paste tables from Word into a page – intact. That’s time not spent fidgeting and reformatting – plus fewer expletives ;).

 

Paste images

You or someone else has already put in effort to embed images within the logical flow of their story or article, be it in a Web page or Office document. Like how you want to maintain tables from Word, you also want to copy and paste text and images at the same time, and avoid having to upload and re-place each image. Copy. Paste. Publish!

 

Performance improvements

In addition to evolving team news viewing and authoring, we have improved the overall page load performance, which also applies to how fast a news article or page will load in the SharePoint mobile apps. You’ve piqued their interest, and they won’t have to wait long to appreciate your genius.

Your voice, heard!

Good news is good news. We hope you like all the news on news we’re sharing today. We look forward to your feedback. Please share your thoughts and questions in comments below, submit your ideas to the SharePoint UserVoice page, and we always have an eye on your tweets to @SharePoint. Let us know. Who knows, today’s (feedback on) news could be tomorrow’s headlines!

 

Thanks,

Mark (@mkashman) - senior product manager | SharePoint

 

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Q: When will team news appear on SharePoint home?

A: News on SharePoint home begins rolling out to First Release customers in the coming days. We expect to begin worldwide rollout to all Office 365 customers in the coming months.

 

Q: When can users expect to see these updates to SharePoint apps on their devices?

A: If you install the SharePoint mobile app, you will see all the new features. And if you’ve already installed the SharePoint app, you will soon see an app update in your app store. Update early, update often, you’ll love what an update brings. :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes:

29 Comments
Microsoft

Great progress @Mark Kashman! Surfacing Team News on the SharePoint Home Page will be a great way to attract attention to the latest happenings with your team!

Microsoft

Great news here.  Looking forward to working with this in the future.

Silver Contributor
Great to see News from Sites arriving on SharePoint home. Great work!
Copper Contributor

Is social interaction on news part of the roadmap?

Microsoft

@Peter Hofstee: yes, and to be clear we have your intent captured as feedback, what type of social interactions do you mean/want? We've got a few ideas and would love to hear yours for how they map to what we're thinking/planning/hearing... Thx in advance for your thoughts.

Copper Contributor

We now have build a social layer between classical artical pages and blogpages (used for news) with a social platform like Yammer, Slack or the classic SharePoint Newsfeed. We would like to make use of typical features like commenting and giving likes.

 

Besides that, some basic tagging would be great as well. So you can follow specific news by following a tag.

Copper Contributor

Great news. At Ignite you talked about Corporate News in addition to Team News. Is this still a part of the Roadmap and will the Corporate News be presented at the SharePoint Home as well?

Steel Contributor

Will these great features also soon be available in sites where Publishing is enabled? (=the traditional enterprise intranets)

 

 

Iron Contributor

This is great stuff @Mark Kashman! Above social interaction, I would love to have a feature giving both users and admins ways to configure notifications for news items. To have conditional mobile/email/O365 notification for news, e.g. from a specific team site, user, tag or priority, would be helpful for getting the message out to users with less frequent interaction with SharePoint – maybe an opportunity to also drive their adoption. 

Great News Mark ! We are glad to ear more news like this !

Brass Contributor

Hi @Mark Kashman!
We are heavily using the classic Sharepoint Newsfeed. It would be great if you can also follow tags and people in News equal to the Sharepoint Newsfeed.
This in combination with a reply and like option will give us a great opportunity to displace content from Sharepoint Newsfeed to News.

Copper Contributor
Why is there no Calendar or Events web part? The Highlighted Content works ok, but the lack of a graphical calendar seems like a pretty big oversight.
Microsoft

@Brigt Gjevik: Yes. This is on the roadmap this year for sure, with more to share on the News service all up in a few months. Bottoms up and tops down defines the strategy of the SharePoint + Office 365 news service.

Microsoft

@Morten Myrstad: The team is aware and working on approach.

Microsoft

@Ray Terrill: both are on the backlog. The team has a good list and continuous work items. Thx for insight into what you feel is missing today.

Silver Contributor
Out of pure curiosity is anybody seeing News on SharePoint Home yet? Recognise that Mark has said coming days!
Copper Contributor

"Paste tables from word, intact"

 

Hi can you confirm the text part will be updated to support pasted tables? Or is a new part coming?

 

I'm not having much success doing this atm.

Copper Contributor

Hi I have a dev tenant on First release program but I can't see the sections webparts mentioned here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Using-web-parts-on-pages-336e8e92-3e2d-4298-ae01-d404bbe751...

 

43dce08f-e96f-43e9-bfcd-2d93faf87c7c.png

 

 

Microsoft

We've talked about multi-column support, and are actively working on it, but it is not released to production yet. Coming soon, and where you see it is a good sign, however a little early to have noted in the support article as 'live' - Mark.

Silver Contributor
Any update on progress in deployment on First Release? Last I heard was 10%. Can we expect more this week? Here's hoping.
Bronze Contributor

We're seeing News on SharePoint Home, though without Thumbnails. 

Microsoft

@Alina Skarbovsky says, "We rolled out News on SharePoint Home to all customers today!" in a comment on News on SharePoint Home is rolling out!

 

@Ivan, you mentioned that you are not seeing thumbnails for News. Can you please share details?

@Ivan Unger, you mentioned above that you are not seeing thumbnails for News. Can you please share details?

Bronze Contributor

@Alina Skarbovsky 

I stand corrected, image previes from news do show up. I just checked and it seems that the latest news in our ORG just didn't use any images.

I then viewed all the latest news and have noticed a few image previews. I did see one other odd looking issue that seems to be related to images with transparency. In these cases I see the image with a transparent background, and the default news icon behind that.

 

Image 1.png

Thanks @Ivan Unger, the transparent image is a known issue that we will be fixing.

Copper Contributor

Ive been able to paste tables into a modern Sharepoint pages but still be unable to paste an image. Should i be abel to use this feature? 

Iron Contributor

We are deep into planning our all new SharePoint ecosystem in O365.  One of the things I'm trying to get my arms around is the right approach for aggregating news and simplifying navigation. 

Prior to the new SharePoint Home page with News, we had planned on somehow aggregating news from across sites to the Intranet home page.  The SP home experience also makes it easier to move the user through the navigation challenges of an Intranet, various team sites, and Microsites for internal promotional programs.  Having the new home page makes all this a lot easier.  THANK YOU SHAREPOINT TEAM!!!

 

@Mark Kashman do you have any perspective about where the sweet-spot is for a count of sites that a user "favorites"  where things start to get out of control for them?  Meaning where there's too many sites in their list to reasonably interact with them? 

Our plan is to have the following buckets for sites:

  • Intranet of official information & communication - Communication Site
  • Your Department's Team Site
  • Other Departments/Channels you're interested in, and are following - News articles they publish on their "public" page as opposed to their intra-dept Team Site.
  • The Work Team(s) you are assigned to - Team Sites
  • Special operational project(s)s you are helping out with, or have volunteered for - Team Sites
  • Committees or social groups you either participate in (Team Sites), or are generally interested in by favoriting their "public" page
  • Internal short-term promotional and change-management sites - Publishing sites

For the average user, this would be a total count of 10 or less sites.  Some people may need up to 50, and others may just simply go overboard with favoriting everything because they're cray-cray and think they'll miss something.

 

I'm essentially trying to figure out:

a) Is this is too many sites/things to have on the SharePoint home?  I know you'll only see those you have permission for, but quite a few of our users will have access to all.

b) What guidance should we give users around how many is too many for them to favorite?

c) Have you guys done any user experience testing around this, that might help us understand the ins and outs of planning a good SP Home Experience?

It does seem like site naming is critical, color coding may also be helpful, and the icons that show-up on the SP home as the little site identifier bug could also help out a lot.

Any other tips?? All guidance is appreciated!

 

Bronze Contributor

Hi @Beth Hall,

 

I highly suggest you wait one more month for Ignite to finish. I has been hinted multiple times, that Microsoft intends to improve the Corporate-level stuff/roll up possibilities. I'm in the same boat as you currently and I'm test driving one departmental communication site at the moment and am wating for fresh information on how to connect them. 

I expect Microsoft will either improve the SharePoint Home Page to include more content types (in addition to news) and add a few missing elements (like show all Sites that I'm a member of - this is a pain point for new sites, which you've neither favorites, since you've never visited it, and also wouldn't be suggested, since nobody else visited it).

It could go a few other ways though, like improving to the portal.office.com page for a more personalized experience across Office 365 workloads (upcoming planner tasks, recommended stream videos for this users, ...) or a new Communication Site template designed for rolling up other communication sites and an improved highlighted content webpart that is more suited for this kind of roll up.

These are few things I'm hoping for and why I'm waiting with migrating our current intranet solution.

Version history
Last update:
‎Mar 07 2017 08:31 AM
Updated by: