Push company announcements on O365 login

[AdamWG]

I have an executive administrator who would like to force all of our users through our SharePoint home page when they log into SharePoint, so they land on that page and are more likely to see company news & announcements listed there. We've been discussing this off and on for a few days now.

In my opinion, forcing people to go to the home site before they can navigate to their own site is just going to create hassle for them, not to mention the fact that it's likely not even possible (users often log straight into their team sites or pages using bookmarks; or they don't even go to SharePoint, but some other app). I do like the idea of pushing announcements to users - just not necessarily like through forcing a SharePoint page.

Instead, my thinking is trying to do something less intrusive, but also have it apply to all O365 logins rather than just SharePoint visits (although it could be just SP visits if there's an option that wouldn't work globally for O365). I envision a place for executives and admins to add announcements and news, which users would see when logging into O365. Even a modal popup or something would suffice; effective without being overly obnoxious.

Does O365 offer something that may work for this purpose that I'm unaware of, or could something like this be customized in? Would love to hear your ideas. Thanks!

Adam

[#2]

Why would you prefer something as part of the login process? If anything, you should be teaching your users not to click any links during login and be very suspicious of any popups and the overall layout. 

[#3]

I’m not suggesting there be links, nor would it be part of the login process. This would be after a successful login with multi factor authentication, and could simply display information regarding news and important announcements for our organizations.

If I were to implement something that would be a modal or popup that is out of the ordinary with default O365 behavior, I would give my users adequate training to be prepared for it alongside the ample IT security and O365 training they’re already receiving.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

I disagree with the forcing the home assumption. I've done this for 2 org now with great success. As long as your intranet landing page rolls up relevant information, and provides them with great global nav to get to what they need, they will get used to using it and going there. I force every browser homepage to the intranet and people just see that first thing when opening the browser, if they chose to bookmark to something quickly that's fine, but they will at least usually get a glimpse of the news at a minimum.

Other options would be using Microsoft Teams, since it's a desktop client and pushing some news in that way assuming you use Teams. But I still prefer just using the browser for the intranet home. This will be even better once they push out the SharePoint Home updates.

Ideally, for your scenario, if we could push notifications to users suite bar notification area that might be a good place, but to my knowledge this isn't possible. You can also install some 3rd party spfx extensions that can add banners and popups of some kind to SharePoint pages, but again need to apply to the ones people will be visiting so they will take effect.

[#5]

@Chris Webb Understood. I'll have to look into the SharePoint Home updates you alluded to, but it does sound like there isn't a solution to this in the way I'd originally envisioned, but that's alright. I'll take your recommendation back to the team here and entertain an overhaul to the home page, as that'll probably be the best route if we can get the navigation to be clean and intuitive, then set that as the browser home page. Thanks for the feedback!