Keep your team up to date! And do it in a way that’s easy for anyone to consume and stay engaged. With SharePoint pages and news, you create relevant, content-rich announcements and reports that look great on any device and within other applications, including Microsoft Teams, filled with content from inside and outside Office 365. And news articles are available to all team members even if they join the team weeks or months after publication.
We are excited to begin rolling out five SharePoint pages and news capabilities across Office 365:
- Create news from SharePoint home in Office 365
- Add pages and news as tabs in Microsoft Teams channels
- Post all your team news into Microsoft Teams automatically
- Create and send informative email news digests
- Measure the impact and engagement of your news articles
Let’s dive into the details.
Create news from SharePoint home in Office 365
There is no better way to create dynamic updates throughout your organization than with SharePoint news. And now you can do it from a more centralized starting point. From the SharePoint home in Office 365, simply click Create news and choose where you wish to publish your news, starting with a list of frequent and followed sites. Once you choose the site, you’re taken directly to the news authoring canvas for that site. Give it a title, add your content from an ever-expanding set of web parts, and start making news!
Note: You can create news only on sites where you are a member.
Learn more about creating news from SharePoint home in Office 365.
Add pages and news articles as tabs in Microsoft Teams channels
After you’ve created news, it’s time to share it. And why not target your hub for teamwork – Microsoft Teams – where you and your peers already connect and collaborate. SharePoint is a content service for Microsoft Teams, enabling you to surface content in the context of your work.
It is now possible to use the SharePoint tab to add pages, news articles and lists as tabs in Microsoft Teams channels. The result is just like you see in a browser but integrated as a tab in a channel. You can fully interact with the content – including sorting and views for lists, filtering reports within the Power BI web part, and viewing video in the Microsoft Stream web part.
Click add a tab, click the SharePoint tab, select your page or news, choose if you want to post to a channel about this tab, and then click Save. If your team creates and shares a lot of news, add the news page from the list of available pages from the team site. This will add the news archive as a tab, where you can see all of the news your team has posted.
Note: there will be two SharePoint-oriented tabs to choose when adding a tab, one for SharePoint Document libraries and one for SharePoint pages and news. To add a list, simply grab the URL and use the Website tab.
Post all your team news into Microsoft Teams automatically
You can also post each news article to your team automatically, to drive visibility and engagement. Each article generates a conversation within the selected Microsoft Teams channel.
Just add the News connector! Right-click any Microsoft Teams channel, click Connectors, and then add SharePoint News. Now every published news article will spark a conversation. SharePoint news: the ultimate ice breaker 😉.
Learn more about adding SharePoint news articles to a Microsoft Teams channel.
Create and send informative email news digests
Expand the reach and engagement of your news articles to your peers throughout the company via Outlook. And to keep things concise, combine select news articles into one consolidated, auto-formatted email news digest.
From the full list of news articles on your site (click "See all" from the news web part), select specific news items, add people or groups on the To: line, add a simple message for context, and click Send. The email will arrive in their inbox with clean previews (image and text) with deep links to the full news articles in SharePoint.
Learn more about how to send an email news digest from your SharePoint site.
Measure the impact and engagement of your pages and news articles
Once your message is out there, you’ll want to track how it’s doing. Like the Site usage page, which gives site owners a view of how users are interacting with a site, we are introducing a view of usage on each page and news article.
At the bottom of each SharePoint page or news article you’ll see a row of information that tells you how many people have liked your content, how many left comments and total number of views. When you hover over the liked section, you’ll see a list of colleagues who liked your ideas. And when you click on comments (and you left commenting on), you’ll jump right into the section at the bottom of the page to read feedback and engage with your audience. It is now also possible to like an individual comment.
Up next
To learn more about these new features AND about the SharePoint news system all up, check out this related webinar:
- WEBINAR ON-DEMAND | “SharePoint news end-to-end – create, view and distribute” [presentation + lots of demos of the new features and more to get the breadth of what the growing SharePoint news service offers.
- BIG EVENT | SharePoint Conference North America (#SPC18 | @SPConf) - This is a premier opportunity to hear experts from Microsoft and around the world share their experience and knowledge about a variety of topics such as cloud services, best practices & real-world project insights. The Microsoft Teams team will has a number of overview and depth sessions on the schedule. Join in: 100+ Microsoft & MVP speakers, 160+ sessions, 1 big keynote with Jeff Teper (CVP) and 1 giant SharePint.
- WHEN | May 21-23 – Las Vegas, NV
- REGISTER TODAY. [this link saves you $50 at time of registration]
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.
—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How can I expect the new and updated news and Microsoft Teams features to roll out to Office 365 customers?
A: New and updated SharePoint news and Microsoft Teams integrations listed above will begin to roll out to Targeted Release customers throughout the coming weeks. We are targeting the beginning of May 2018 for complete worldwide rollout.
And if you made it this far…
… look at a few examples of rich news articles created in SharePoint ...
