April 2019 Updates to SharePoint News
Published Apr 23 2019 09:00 PM 71.2K Views
Microsoft

SharePoint news helps you enhance communications and engagement with employees and stakeholders.  Here are our latest enhancements for pages and news in SharePoint:

  • Audience targeting [starting April 2019]
  • Email notification for engagement with news and pages [starting late April 2019]
  • Organization assets [starting May 2019]
  • Call to action links on hero web part [starting May 2019]

Audience targeting for SharePoint news and pages

Audience targeting ensures that relevant news and content is presented to people based on attributes such as their roles or locations in an organization. You can define one or more groups as targets for any news article or page.

Web part targetingWeb part targeting

News targetingNews targeting

You can target content in many kinds of groups – Azure AD, Office 365 and dynamic groups.  News and pages will support audience targeting.  Rollout to targeted release tenants is slated to begin in late April.

 

SharePoint authors will receive emails with comments, replies and likes

When someone comments on your page or news post, SharePoint notifies you via email.  The SharePoint mobile app alerts you as well.    Multiple comments will be batched so that you receive a single email when several comments have been received within a short period of time. Additionally, you’ll get email notices when users reply to comments or leave a “like”.  You can unsubscribe from particular notifications by clicking the “Unsubscribe” link in the footer of the email.

You've gotten a comment...You've gotten a comment...

 

This feature will start rollout to targeted release in April, with worldwide rollout currently scheduled to be completed in mid-June 2019.

Organization Assets

Digital assets can help you tell a more dynamic story, which is why SharePoint pages already support images and logos from web search, file upload, and site assets. Organization assets lets you register one or more document libraries via PowerShell as a special source for images, such as photos and logos, across all sites. The Organization assets libraries are available when you add images to page headers, galleries, or other web parts. We’ll start rollout to targeted release in late May 2019.

Browsing for organization assetsBrowsing for organization assets

Call to action links for the hero web part – sharing and more

Using the latest version of the hero web part on SharePoint, authors can add a link to content and an additional call to action link that displays on the tile:

Call to action links on the hero web partCall to action links on the hero web part

 

You can use this to propose additional actions. One of the most common is sharing.  Publishers can use the secondary link to encourage employees to promote content via Yammer, or externally accessible content via LinkedIn Elevate, Twitter, or other social channels.

 

This feature can be enabled from the “Edit details” panel for an item in a hero web part. Expand the Options dropdown and set the radio button for “Show call to action link” to YES.

Configuring a call to action linkConfiguring a call to action link

LinkedIn Elevate provides a streamlined way to let employees share articles externally through their social channels to promote employee advocacy and to give the organization insights through centralized analytics and reporting.  If you’re a LinkedIn Elevate customer, you can generate a LinkedIn Elevate permalink for a call to action link.  

 

Conclusion

SharePoint news and pages empower you to transform employee communications in Microsoft 365.  For more information, see our Microsoft 365 Resource Center for news on the TechCommunity.    We look forward to sharing even more at SharePoint Conference in May 2019.

57 Comments
Copper Contributor

Can't wait to test this.

Brass Contributor

Audience targeting will solve a lot for our customer. Tanks!

Copper Contributor

Nice, excited to try out the call to action functionality!

Good stuff, love that we can finally get alerts for comments / likes etc. other than on the mobile app, however since most internal communications are being pushed to Teams for a lot of organizations, would be nice to have an option to change where those like's and comments from SharePoint go, and let us choose to have them go into the Teams Activity feed. Or a compromise of from "SharePoint" chat contact or something. 

Copper Contributor

When will we get Audience targeting on Navigation?

Steel Contributor

Regarding the Organization Assets, will you be able to reference these as a source for images in O365 authoring apps from the Insert -> Online Pictures button? If the answer is "No"... I'ma hop over to User Voice and post it - that would be an awesome feature to have implemented.

Brass Contributor

Cannot wait to get my hands on these new enhancements. 

Brass Contributor

Nice, was missing those functions

Steel Contributor

I'd still love News notifications or a digest that can be sent to the company but these are really great improvments

Copper Contributor
Will it also be possible to disable those notifications completely? So, disable notifications for all pages instead of unsubscribing per page? Will it then also be possible to enable notifications per page? So, opt-in instead of opt-out for mail notifications?
Iron Contributor

can't wait for target audiencing and the org. assets!

 

Brass Contributor

Very nice updates!

Copper Contributor

Features sounds good, has to test once it's released to understand much better way.

Copper Contributor

Exciting updates, however, as another member mentioned above, will there be a way to disable notifications from news posts?  This can be a useful tool, however, I do not see all users being as receptive to constant email alerts.

Steel Contributor

Is there any chance we could get "News Pages" as a separate type rather than a site page?  I want people to be able to add news only, not give them permission to edit other site pages.

 

News Pages should be their only library with item level permissions.

Iron Contributor

@David Gormanthat"s an excellent suggestion.

 

+1 

Copper Contributor

Will these features be rolling out to GCC at the same time, or will these features have the standard government cloud lag? Thanks!

Microsoft

Great improvements to Sharepoint. Echoing a previous comment, it would be really useful to have "Share in Teams" as an action, both as part of the News Link as well as in the action menu when publishing a page. Email is great and important, but as we push Teams as the primary means of communication, people should be able to easily share interesting pages via the "promote" button on a Teams channel.

Copper Contributor

Never mind on my question about GCC. I had the question answered through another means. I've come to learn that feature changes in a service (like SPO) are rolled out globally to all clouds. However, GCC and the sovereign clouds will come at the end of the global roll-out. This is different from new product roll-outs. Those have the 12-18-month delay. 

Brass Contributor

These functionalities are really awesome and would help different business across departments.

Brass Contributor

Is the described audience targeting feature the Featured ID: 50805 from the Office 365 roadmap?

HI @Chris McNulty , it looks like the audience targeting is only available in the news web part if you display news from within this site. Can you confirm this? Or is audience targeting also available when I display news from all sites within my hub? I the last option is not the case, the feature is pretty shortcoming in my opinion.

Microsoft

@Timothy Balk, currently organization assets is scoped for use when publishing SharePoint pages using the following webparts: Image web part, Image gallery web part, Hero web part, Title region, File Viewer, Quick links, Page details thumbnail

 

Great suggestion for use across other O365 authoring apps, though - please post in User Voice! 

Steel Contributor

@Nicole Woon User Voice Posted, ran out of characters for the title LOL - 

"Make Organization Assets in SharePoint Online sources for Inserting Pictures in all authoring"

(https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/264636-general/suggestions/37653556-make-organization-assets-...)

Copper Contributor
  • Email notification for engagement with news and pages [starting late April 2019]

    When is this coming out for General release tenants?
Iron Contributor

I wonder the same thing as @Robert Schouten, if its only per site then the feature is worthless imo.

Copper Contributor
Where will the PowerShell be made available for Org assets?
Copper Contributor

Dying to use Audience targeting , when we can use it ?

Copper Contributor

Any news about Audience targeting, in the roadmap teatured ID: 50805 it's says that this will be released in May CY2019. Today is the last day of May, our customer have waited a long time for this now, they are into target release and hopes that this should be rolled out by now? This feature is the high prio and much important for our customer.

Copper Contributor
SharePoint notifies you via email - really? Why not Yammer, activity within Teams, Delve. Can not believe via e-mail. And only the author is also not helpfull.
Copper Contributor

Well I love the fact that these improvements are being made and I applaud the efforts behind them whole-heartedly. I am however thinking we can do better. SharePoint is part of the automation story therefore it needs not be laborious. I ignore most of the email notifications from teams, reason I have to log into teams to check out the discussion. We all agree that we respond to phone calls or  pop up notifications faster than email. So I'd be happier if I could get cortana dial my number or a descriptive pop up appears on top of my with an answer button and I can choose to ignore or respond immediately. Just my though. 

Iron Contributor

@Don Hackman, yes there will be PowerShell cmdlets.

In fact, there already is one (Set-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary): https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/blogs/new-sharepoint-csom-version-released-for-shar...

Steel Contributor

Nothing of this is available yet in first release. We are almost mid-june. Maybe you should not give dates as it creates user expectations. Also consultants are always on hold with their customers on important features like audience, document sets etc. We let them know theses dates but most of the time Microsoft does not make it. It is very frustrating.

Brass Contributor

I totally agree with @Martin Coupal ! publishing such article on 23th of April and until today the audience targeting feature is still not deployed. :(

Thats not good expectation management!

 

We as Microsoft Partners in touch with customers, who are waiting for this feature are cannot tell them any status update.

Copper Contributor

Is there a way to check when this will be available in the tenant? Thanks.

Copper Contributor

What about customising Search Results? Will there be any upcoming updates like integrating the github solution "SharePoint Framework modern search Web Parts"?

Brass Contributor

Any idea when Organization Assets library will be available, and how to enable it through PowerShell ?I couldn't find any documentation about it. 

It was announced to be available by end of May but we're already mid-June and we can't see it available on our tenant.

 

Brass Contributor
Brass Contributor

I tried the PowerShell command Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary @Henrik linked to but it didn't work and says it is an experimental feature not yet enabled etc. It is listed in the MS 365 roadmap as rolling out. So it must be close to being released.

Brass Contributor

Thank you @Henrik Mou Martinsen .  The cmdlet was available once I updated the SPO management shell to the latest version. However it requires enabling CDN, which I'm not yet ready to do without careful analysis. 

Copper Contributor

There should also be an option in news webpart to see all news from sites that you are following as a way to target audience too.

@Hazelle this kind of already happens when you use the recommended filter on the news webpart as followed sites always show from my experience. 

Microsoft

@Jerome_K @Henrik Mou Martinsen @LindsayAddie We are currently at 100% targeted release and will continue the rollout to production/worldwide soon. We have documentation for organization assets available on the following articles:

 

Admin article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/organization-assets-library

 

PowerShell documentation:

Add https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/add-spoorgassetslibrary?view=sh...

Get https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/get-spoorgassetslibrary?view=sh...

Set https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/set-spoorgassetslibrary?view=sh...

Remove https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/remove-spoorgassetslibrary?view...

 

Webpart related documentation:

Create and use modern pages on a SharePoint site: http://support.office.com/en-us/article/b3d46deb-27a6-4b1e-87b8-df851e503dec

View, edit, and add page details: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/view-edit-and-add-page-details-778018d3-8269-4fd2-a55d-8c0e...

Use the Hero web part: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-the-hero-web-part-d57f449b-19a0-4b0d-8ce3-be5866430645

Use the  Image web part:  https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-the-image-web-part-a63b335b-ad0a-4954-a65d-33c6af68beb2...

Use the Image Gallery web part: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-the-Image-Gallery-web-part-BBCBE560-14A7-4369-8EF5-3255...

Use the File viewer web part: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-the-file-viewer-web-part-e53a9602-e7b3-4fff-9126-de2f18...

Use the Quick links web part: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-the-Quick-Links-web-part-E1DF7561-209D-4362-96D4-469F85...

Copper Contributor

When setting Set-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary I get "Unknown Error". Anyone else get this? Any idea on the possible issue?

I have both args for the Doc Lib and Thumbs URLs set.

Brass Contributor

Same here Don, and Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary doesn't exist for me (with the latest management shell). I suspect you have to use Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary to add a source, and then you can update an existing source with Set-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary. This is likely the reason we are getting "Unknown Error", so the real question: where's Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary?

Deleted
Not applicable

@Nicole Woon Any news on the roll-out plan for "SharePoint news email notifications" (Featured ID: 49603)?

 

Still waiting for this feature and it is still not available on my targeted release tenant. 

Copper Contributor

This comment notifications is not working now, It was working in our tenant till 2 weeks back. Now it has suddenly stopped working.

Copper Contributor

I'm still missing the Audience options on the webparts for some reason it's not working on my modern sites,is there anything that should be setup?

Copper Contributor

Same issue as Lespinellsb, no options available in the news web part for the audience targeting ..

Any updates ? 

Brass Contributor

I would be nice if we could schedule news. Is this something that is comming?

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