SharePoint news updates in Office 365, including Microsoft Teams integration
Published Apr 11 2018 08:00 AM 56.6K Views
Microsoft

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!

 

Click "Create news post" to start a new news article from SharePoint home in Office 365Click "Create news post" to start a new news article from SharePoint home in Office 365

After clicking "Create news post," you choose where to publish your news.After clicking "Create news post," you choose where to publish your 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.

 

When you "Add a tab" in Microsoft Teams, choose the SharePoint tab to add a page or news article to your channel.When you "Add a tab" in Microsoft Teams, choose the SharePoint tab to add a page or news article to your channel.

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.

 

An info-rich news article as a tab in Microsoft Teams (in expanded view)An info-rich news article as a tab in Microsoft Teams (in expanded view)

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 ;).

 

Choose the SharePoint News connector for your Microsoft Team channel.Choose the SharePoint News connector for your Microsoft Team channel.

Once connected, each new published news article will start a new thread within the channel conversation.Once connected, each new published news article will start a new thread within the channel conversation.

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.

 

After you select the desired news article for your newsletter, add your recipients and a custom message.After you select the desired news article for your newsletter, add your recipients and a custom message.

In Outlook, the newsletter retains a clean layout with previews of each article and corresponding image.In Outlook, the newsletter retains a clean layout with previews of each article and corresponding image.

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.

 

Page usage information (Likes, Views and Comments) appear at the bottom of each page or news article.Page usage information (Likes, Views and Comments) appear at the bottom of each page or news article.

 

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 ... 

 

A SharePoint news article within a team site that is associated to a hub site.A SharePoint news article within a team site that is associated to a hub site.

A SharePoint news article within a communication site.A SharePoint news article within a communication site.

26 Comments
Bronze Contributor

All cool releases. If there is one wish I could make about the news tab for teams, it would be to broaden the site sources and make it like the news web part for hub sites. 

Having automatic news in a channel is great, except in cases where news are not created in team sites, but rather in communication sites (which is intentional). We have departmental communication sites that are publicly available, and then there a lot of internal groups. I'd like to surface the news from communication sites, within the departmental teams channels.

Copper Contributor

Still no single word about formatting paragraphs as right-to-left (RTL) or left-to-right (LTR), without this feature the whole new experience of SharePoint is useless for us.

 

Deleted
Not applicable

 we discussed that in the AMA or community post sometime back and they are looking into it. The biggest issue is handling permissions, because you could have someone bring a SharePoint news source from a site others don't have access too. And since it's a post there isn't any kind of security trimming there. Easiest way would allow sources that have sites set to "Everyone" and "Everyone but external users" groups set on those site pages libraries be available to use as a source thou for a quick win. 

 

 

Deleted
Not applicable

Man, not being able to @ mention anyone and attach images in the community makes it rough :(. 

Microsoft

@Deleted we're working on a solution there. We had to deploy a security fix, unfortunately it seems @ mentions had to take a hit. @Allen is on the case!

Community Manager

@Deleted @Anna Chu

 

Thanks both - I am pleased to confirm we have been able to make a change to our security fix this morning to enable @ mentions for all users again. Also image posting will now work again. 

Copper Contributor

@Ivan Unger This is exactly the thing I just ran into. I would love to connect this to a Hub site news roll-up, not limit it to the Team page

Deleted
Not applicable

@Ivan Unger @Evert Eckhardt Agree, we do the same thing with our Departments each having their own Org facing communication sites where they put their news. The only quick win IMO that would work here is allowing the News Feed to tap into News/hub that is shared with Everyone/Everyone except External users or something along those lines. Possibly just make the connector run as a generic "User" and if it can see the news then post it. Otherwise, you have a major security hurdle to figure out with the news. But if they could just bring that functionality alone it would be great. 

Bronze Contributor

yup, I totally understand the challenge from a security perspective. I'm sure Microsoft will have some great idea. 

Bronze Contributor

 


@Deleted wrote:

@Man, not being able to @ mention anyone and attach images in the community makes it rough :(.  

 

@Agreed. There are a lot of places where there has been some sort of Team integration but the ability to @ people/channels/teams limits that integration appeal. Examples:

  • This article
  • @iOS you cannot @ anyone when you share something with a Team
  • @Flow actions cannot @ anyone, so posts to teams just get ignored.

@I wish MS would require @ support for anything to be able to post to a conversation.

 

Deleted
Not applicable

@Ed Hansberry I was talking about this community pages ability to @ mention :P. But I do agree, flow etc. should be able to do some kind of @ mentions as well. Find the uservoice for it, if not there, make one, post about it in Teams community and get discussion going if it's not there, but I recall there already being lots of mentions for this ask! 

Silver Contributor
@Mark Kashman @Andy Haon mentioned Email Digests was about to go to TR. Can you confirm we might see it this week? Thanks.
Microsoft

@John Wynne - we've got a formatting issue we want to fix before starting to rollout email digests for news.  Should start rolling out soon, but we are quality driven on this one so the date will move if it needs to.

 

Thanks for the feedback on being able to select news sources in Teams, like we've enabled starting for hubs.  We hear that feedback.

 

Also I understand the conversation here started with being to @mention here in the community but it's also a capability we're looking into in product and it's in our backlog..  @Debjani Mitra

Silver Contributor
Thanks for the responses @Andy Haon. Really appreciated.
Microsoft

@Ali-Saadeddin - can you give us more information on the issue(s) you are seeing?

 

In SharePoint pages, we support right-to-left (RTL) languages, we support having both RTL and LTR text in the same text block, and we also support aligning text to right, center or left justified.

 

@Sohail Tariq@Anton Labunets

Copper Contributor

@Andy Haon You have support for RTL and LTR in classic SharePoint pages, but in modern pages, in News for example or in Text the whole page will be RTL or LTR, but in the Formatting Controls  Toolbar of the paragraph for example there are controls to align text right, left or center, but not RTL or LTR, unless there is some hidden way to show or hide these controls.

Copper Contributor

@Andy Haon

This is the formatting toolbar in News web part:

News-Toolbar.png

If you click (...) More button, this displays sidebar:

Sidebar.png

Which also does not have LTR/RTL button.

I hope this is clear, and unfortunately, this also applies to Sway, and all modern parts of the SharePoint.

And I assume that you know the difference between aligning text (right) and making paragraph (RTL).

Steel Contributor

Would be great if the news digest open in Outlook or mail client. This will allow us to send the digest from a shared mailboxes without having to send to our mailbox first.

Steel Contributor

Great features set!

 

Any plan for feature that will let us scheduled an automatic digest each week or any way to achieve this with the Graph API/Flow?

Microsoft

@Ali-Saadeddin - Modern pages takes into account site locale and user locale settings to reflow content RTL or LTR and it's automatic. Can you please elaborate on the functionality in classic pages that is missing in modern pages w.r.t RTL/ LTR  and your scenario/ usage of it?  

 

@Anton Labunets@Paula Wing@Andy Haon

 

 

Microsoft

@Ali-Saadeddin - when you say RTL/LTR do you really mean the page-level dir="" attribute value or just alignment of the paragraph? The former is driven by user profile settings, while the latter is right there in the paragraph aligment as you can see below?

Aligment optionsAligment options

Copper Contributor

@Anton Labunets @Sohail Tariq

First of all the (Right-to-Left) reading order is totally different from aligning text to the right, in this photo you can find the same sentence which has mixed Arabic and English text, this sentence is aligned right in the two lines, but in the first line it is in RTL reading order, and in the second it is in LTR reading order:

rtl-and-ltr.png

I need this option on the level of Paragraph, not page or profile. We usually write Arabic articles that have a lot of English words, and sometimes we write articles that are in English with some Arabic word. When these articles are displayed in wrong reading order, they will be near impossible to read, and we must copy these article into Word and align them in the correct reading order to read.

Some Arabic articles also have complete paragraphs in LTR reading order (code snippets for example or quotes), the whole article should be formatted as LTR, but these paragraphs show be in LTR.

In classic SharePoint sites, you can find these formatting options in the following photo for example:

rtl-and-ltr-classic.png

 

Copper Contributor

@Anton Labunets @Andy Haon

 

Please try this HTML code in any browser, it is the same sentence, first in RTL, second in LTR:

<p style="text-align: right;" dir="rtl">شركة Microsoft تفهمني</p>
<p style="text-align: right;" dir="ltr">شركة Microsoft تفهمني</p>

Of course this is a three word sentence, but in real world the situations not so simple.

Bronze Contributor

Is the new SharePoint tab available in Microsoft Teams yet? I cannot find it.

@Mark Kashman Is the news digest functionality currently rolled out? Cannot find them on any of my first release tenants and the documentation is not updated.

Update: it appears only when more the four news has been posts

Brass Contributor

Regarding comments such as this one, it would be great to turn on notification to author of new comments and to those who write comments if they are replied. You cant lurk around on all pages to look for comments or replies.

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