April 2019 Updates to SharePoint News
Published Apr 23 2019 09:00 PM 71.6K 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

Comment notifications were activated in my site, but the implementation is quite disappointing: 
notifications are sent only to the author as in the "createdby" field. This is the very first person who created the page. 
On the frontend, you can change the display author of a page, but this is not used for notifications. 
In an organization  where people change job (=all?), it's extremely unlikely that the owership of certain content will remain with the same person forever. We should allow changing the target of notifications, for example using the Display Author field, instead of the Createby field.

I've opened a suggestion for this https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/38463424-send-ema...

Copper Contributor

Where can I find the option to be notified about comments and replies, was this actually rolled out?

Microsoft

Hello @Chris McNulty ,

I was wondering if Azure AD Dynamic Groups support for audience targeting is something that is on the roadmap and if we maybe have an ETA on the release, taking that the public article mentions they are not supported at the moment:
https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/target-files-news-and-pages-to-specific-audiences-33d84cb6-...
"Azure AD dynamic groups are not currently supported."
while in this article from last year you were saying they would be included.

Copper Contributor

Regarding Notifications for comments  :

 

By default this setting is enabled for comments on modern page. Is there a way we can disable notifications for comments on page.?  I am working on a migration and on behalf user we are saving comments using a service account  and each time the comment is created, the author(who created the post/page) is getting bulk notifications. I want to disable this feature temporarily at least during migration.

 

From SPO and PNP Powershell i got the ClientSidePage object and its associated comments via REST, but i don't see any property exposed to disable the notifications for comments.

 

Any idea , how to disable them.?

 

Thanks

Purna

Brass Contributor

comments are nice, but pleeeease, make the notifications default to the person occupying the "author byline" field, and not the one who creates the page, or both. then leave it up to them if they wish to unfollow the page.

Cause people change roles/jobs and the one who creates the page is not necessarily the one who owns the content...

Brass Contributor

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.

 

Was this ever put in place? Right now we receive emails only when someone @mention you in a comment. We do not receive emails for likes, nor comments.  

It seems like the complete rollout was targeted to last year. 

Copper Contributor

@ALDINA3003I just finished a months long case with MS and they said comment notices on all page comments are still in development.  For me they sometimes work, even without @mention, but most of the time they don't.  

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