SharePoint News Enhancements – March 2019
Published Mar 13 2019 07:28 AM 48.4K Views
Microsoft

SharePoint news is a content distribution system that works across personal, team and organizational news. News articles and links can be composed on browser or mobile platforms, and are easily surfaced in portals, Microsoft Teams, email, Microsoft Search and more.   Rich new capabilities will empower communicators to keep groups, departments, and divisions up to date easily.

 

Let’s dive into each feature.

 

News – organize. Within the news web part, you can now organize your news posts to appear in custom order. This means you can highlight high-value content knowing it is more visible among articles published on a site. Learn more in our support article.

Figure 1 Controlling the news display sort orderFigure 1 Controlling the news display sort order

Authoritative news - News can come from many different sites. But you might have "official" or "authoritative" sites for organization news. When these sites are specified as organization news sources, posts from these sites are interleaved throughout all news posts displayed for users on SharePoint home in Office 365, or via the news tab in SharePoint mobile. They are distinguished by a color block on the title as a visual cue.  Admins can manage news sources using simple PowerShell commands, referenced below.

 

Figure 2 Site showing authoritative organization-wide newsFigure 2 Site showing authoritative organization-wide news

News notifications from followed sites – Starting in March 2019, users that follow sites will start to get notifications for any news posted on those sites. They will also get notifications when people they work with posted news.  And soon, news notifications can be delivered over email as well.  It’s never been easier to stay up to date with information from key areas of your intranet.

 

Page templates.  You've created a great page, and you want to make it available for others to use as a starting point for their pages. Or, you need to create a page, but aren’t sure where to start.  Page templates can save time.   

 

Initially, we’ll ship three page templates – basic, text-centric and visual, as shown below.  You can also create your own templates from existing pages.  Once a page is saved as a template, it can be chosen from the Template gallery as users create pages and news.  Again, learn more in our support article.

 

Figure 3 SharePoint page templatesFigure 3 SharePoint page templates

Try more and more of what SharePoint offers, and let us know what you think

We want to empower you and every person on your team to achieve more. Let us know what you need next. We are always open to feedback via UserVoice and continued dialog in the SharePoint community in the Microsoft Tech Community —and we always have an eye on tweets to @SharePoint. Let us know.

 

—Chris McNulty, senior product manager for Microsoft 365

 

FAQs

Q: When is this all being released?

A: Our goal is to release all the items to Targeted Release customers by the end of March 2019.

 

Q: How can administrators manage authoritative news sources?
A: Your tenant admin will need to add sites to the organization news list of sites using PowerShell.  Here are some helpful commands.

33 Comments
Silver Contributor
Great news Chris! A bit concerned that authoritative news is via PowerShell this puts more work on a tenant admin who no doubt will be unable to delegate this work!
Copper Contributor

Can you target Events and/or Documents as well?  Or just News and Pages?

Copper Contributor

I see ability select page templates in my tenant but couldn't figure out how to save a page as template. Is the feature to save page as template released yet? Didn't see any note on Support page about how to create a template from an existing page either.

Brass Contributor

Do we also have support for CSOM C#  as well as REST endpoints ? If yes, can you provide us the documentation links ? 

Iron Contributor

What about audience targeting

Iron Contributor

Page design, finally! :D

Iron Contributor

"You can also create your own templates from existing pages. "

 

-> Where? Basic 3 templates are useless for us, need our own templates.  Can't seem to find it although my tenant is updated with all the updates in the blogpost.

 

No mention of target audiencing? would love that soon 

 

 

Silver Contributor
Audience Targeting was in the first version of this blog but has disappeared. Have asked elsewhere what happened but no response yet. Guess it’s been pushed back?
Iron Contributor

@Chris McNulty I must say I am just slightly confused when it comes to the  News - organize feature.  I had thought it was meant to be part of a release that was completed end of January 2019.  I have it available in my 'test' tenant, where I am on target release, but can't yet see it in my production tenant (where I am also on target release).  It is a feature we have really been hanging out for with our intranet.  I guess I'll take this post to mean that it will be released by end of this month.

Conceptually, authoritative news looks good but its a shame I'm going to have to ask my Office 365 Admins to implement a change to designate sites as authoritative.  A front end control (in settings) would make this simpler, or somehow tie it to hub sites?

 

Really looking forward to Page templates

Copper Contributor

Maybe I missed it but did sticky headers get rolled out? 

Copper Contributor

Great news … don't forget to release to your SharePoint 2019 on-premise customers.

Iron Contributor

@jenn miozzo  - re sticky headers, target release users only seeing these in my tenant.  Guessing you'll be the same

Brass Contributor

Disappointed to see more PowerShell. Front-end Y/N slider for admins would be infinitely preferable. Here our SPO Administrator has no authority to run PowerShell commands, that can only be done by a developer role and believe me the developer has better things to do than flick a switch to make something prettier/slightly nicer in SharePoint. It was annoying enough having to PowerShell on the hub site feature.

Copper Contributor

@Jenny Bruce 

thank you 

 

Iron Contributor

any workflows for approving news items from linked communications sites? Would love the owner of the hub site to approve what appeared here. Otherwise we will end up with test1, test-news, testing-news and other such junk

Iron Contributor

I'm curious about the News Notifications:

 

Does this mean that it will be using the native notifications on the phone O/S.

 

e.g. iOS  - SharePoint news notification will display in the notification centre and/or as pop ups when the phone is locked (like a LinkedIn or Twitter notification?

 

or is this specific notifications within the SharePoint App? Or are we talking about the notification bell on the suite bar ? 

Iron Contributor

Orgnews is not working on mobile app

Iron Contributor

@Chris McNulty Now its April, as a Target Release user who is still not even seeing the news 'organize' enhancements to the News web part it would be great to know when I can expect these in my tenant.

Can you please update the answer to the FAQ - Q: When is this all being released?

 

Copper Contributor

@Chris McNultyI can see the organise news in my tenant but despite having downloaded the latest SPO module the PowerShell commands are not being recognised, when will they be released?

Copper Contributor

Hello,

 

I ran the PowerShell script below:

 

#Connect to your tenant using SharePoint Admin credentials
Connect-SPOService -Url $adminSiteUrl -Credential $credentials
# Set your site to organizational authoritative news site
Set-SPOOrgNewsSite -OrgNewsSiteUrl $siteUrl
#List your organizational authoritative news sites from the tenant
Get-SPOOrgNewsSite

 

But I get this issue. Please help me how to resolve this issue. Thank you!

 

Set-SPOOrgNewsSite : The requested operation is part of an experimental feature that is not supported in the current environment.
At C:\SharePoint\Powershell\authoritative-news-site.ps1:12 char:1
+ Set-SPOOrgNewsSite -OrgNewsSiteUrl https://mydevsite.sharepoint.co …
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Set-SPOOrgNewsSite], ServerException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException,Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell.SPOTenantOrgNews+SetSPOOrgNewsSite

 

Iron Contributor

I tested the new functionality with page design and while its a nice new feature I have some questions and remarks.

  1. When clicking +Add in the News web part and selecting News Post it just creates a news page. When clicking +New on the top menu and selecting News Post I get a menu where I can choose from my page designs. This is confusing for end users. I think the best option here is to remove the +Add from the news web part or at least make it optional to show (I know you can hide it now but that also hides the title).
  2. Page designs are site specific and there is no central library where you can save them and make them available for all sites. Will that change in the future?
Iron Contributor

@Rasmus Österholm 

1) related tweets: https://twitter.com/RachelRNL/status/1118576743663554561

2) great suggestion! Vote +1 for this

Copper Contributor

There should be a GUI interface to manage authoritative news, we should not have to use Powershell for this. You might also consider allowing the SP admin to manage this, the tenant admin is not involved at this level, they don't really care about site news, and thus it is a support burden, they're making changes that don't involve their also making decisions on the changes, which means it shouldn't be their job.

Copper Contributor

@Rasmus Österholm @Denis Tiri 
we need also to bind a page template to a content type!

Copper Contributor

Is there a way to make SHarepoint online news posts / newsfeed an RSS Feed for external application such as Playipp?

Copper Contributor

Is there going to be an option to make news posts / newsfeed available as RSS feeds for outside clients such as playipp?

Copper Contributor

Will news feed be included in flow? As of now i have not found any triggers. I would like to make News available to external applications.

Iron Contributor

Page templates are great but the way they work now makes it really hard to set up company wide templates. The templates are site specific and when copying them to another site they are converted to regular pages again. So if we have an intranet consisting of 20 sites and we want to have 5 different page templates to choose from we end up being forced to create these templates 100 times. Are there any future plans on how to administer this?

Iron Contributor

Hi @Rasmus Österholm 

there's a Community Demo on the SharePoint Patterns and Practices YouTube channel that shows how to Export and Import modern pages including page templates .

I have the same issue as you in my tenant and I have my O365 admins looking at whether they can do this for our template which I've only had time to set up in one site collection so far.  I'm quite hopeful this will be a solution that will be easy for them to implement.

Iron Contributor

Thank you @Jenny Bruce! This saved me alot of time :D

Copper Contributor

Thank you :) But this is only a template for new pages. What about a template, which updates for existing as well?

 

Example: 

We have a page template for Ar/VR devices as Knowlege Base. After 2 weeks we decides to add a Twitter WebPart to the template in order to get it automatically. This change has been not propagated to existing pages. 

 

How to achieve it?  

Iron Contributor

Sharing with the community that the News - organize feature in the News web part  mentioned in this blog post has broken in my tenant (began malfunctioning 22 July 2019).  In a nutshell, when you pin a news item, all the 'automatic' or non-pinned items disappear from the web part display, and the 'See all' link also disappears.  My work around was to remove the malfunctioning news web part and replace it with a new one and just leave everything on 'automatic'.

I'm not sure how widespread the problem is, or how important the feature is for other folk. 

We have logged a ticket with Microsoft Support and they have been able to replicate the problem. According to the Support Engineer, their further investigations indicate: 

"is a specific property is written to the News web part property bag with the pinned News post/link in place, after that, the pinned items will be rendered but the real source will not."

The issue has been escalated to the Product Group and they are working on a fix that will be deployed globally in coming weeks.

Hope the community finds this information useful.

Update 21 August 2019 - this issue has now been fixed in my tenant and should also be resolved for anyone else experiencing the issue. Despite it taking a little while to fix the issue, I do have to commend the Microsoft Support Team for the professional way they handled things and kept me up to date on progress of the fix.

Copper Contributor

Page templates have now been released on SPO and works great but I really need this on my SharePoint 2019 as well.

A roadmap letting SharePoint 2019 users know when to expect new SPO features to their on prem solution would be of great help.

 

I just finished building a SPFx webpart that simulates the new socialbar pageviews based on the search property: ViewsLifeTimeUniqueUsers but if I knew that the Socialbar feature would be released to SharePoint 2019 within a few weeks I could possibly just wait for that instead.

 

I know that you prefer that customers move to SPO but some companies haven't got that option when working on networks that aren't online (for security reasons in this case)

 

Maybe its possible to manually move SPO features to SP2019?

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