Filtering News posts across sites using tags or categories

[andrewparrish]

Hi all. We are in the process of creating an intranet 2.0 in my organization and the question has come from on high as to whether it would be possible to feed specific news articles up to an intranet home page from a different site associated with the intranet hub site. I am currently exploring some form of universal tags or something of that nature that could fulfill this task but I wanted to seek insight from the group for alternatives if that doesn't pan out/exist. Any and all advice/guidance is greatly appreciated.

[#2]

@andrewparrish if you are feeding flows up to the hub site from an associate site, it will feed up all the news posts, you can't specify which posts will flow up.

Rob
Los Gallardos
Intranet, SharePoint and Power Platform Manager (and classic 1967 Morris Traveller driver)

[#3]

thanks for the response and the confirmation that filtering specifically tagged posts cannot appear on an intranet site (instead all posts from the sub-site).

[#4]

Maybe I am missing something here but you can aggregate news based on (managed) metadata. So this requirement should be possible IF you can tag it somehow - manually or automated

[#5]

@andrewparrish Yes, you can create a news web part on Site A that pulls up only News articles from Site B that have a specific managed property. The editor on Site A needs to know the property name and values used on Site B in order to write the query and the property needs to be a managed property, but it is definitely possible if you have metadata on the pages in Site B. 

[#6]

@Susan Hanley Hi! Thank you for the confirmation that it should be possible. I am trying to get this working to show to my VP as we undergo a major facelift of our small intranet. 

At the moment I am able to get it to recognize columns within the same page, but I am having no success with the hub site recognizing a column on the site pages page on site B. 

Do you by chance no of any blog posts or further instructions that could walk me through this? My SharePoint skills are still in their toddler phase.

[#7 · Accepted solution]

This is definitely an advanced skill, but it is not hard to do. I am not aware of any step by step instructions for how to do it but here is a quick way to do a demo to show how it works. You will need to learn about managed metadata, site columns, and the News web part for this to work - as well as options for provisioning sites (which is a completely different topic that you'll want to research). Once you are familiar with these basic terms, here's what you can do. Let's say you want to categorize all news on any site with a News Type. To do that, first create a Term Set in the SharePoint Admin Center for News Types. Make sure each value is unique. Then, create a managed metadata site column on each site called News Type and point the column to the term set you created at the root of your tenant. Add the site column to the Site Pages library on your sites. Now, every site has a column with the exact same name and a shared set of values. You will need to actually create and publish pages with the values for this to work, but once you've got all your content created, you can select the sites you want to roll up in the News Source and then filter using a Managed Property. Find the column you created (it will have a name like owstaxIdNewsType) and use filter options to find Property Name Contains whatever term you are looking to roll up. You have several options for making sure all sites get created with the appropriate columns, but your goal is to ensure that all sites are provisioned with the columns that you need.

[#8]

@Susan Hanley Thank you so much for the information. You gave us hope to continue pushing through on this ask, and I am happy to report I was able to sit down last Friday night to build it out. It is working beautifully, and my COO was really happy!

[#9]

So glad it worked out!! I'm about to use this approach for a client - definitely a relatively simple way to get a very helpful outcome!

[#10]

@Susan Hanley  Does this work even though we don't have subsites?  I've done these steps, but still no managed property was created when I created the meta data in term store in Admin Center, both sites have the meta data columns, but no managed property created.  We have a hub with related sites,, but they are not sub sites.

Just a thought of why it won't work for my environment.  Thanks

[#11]

@CLHess You definitely don't need/want subsites!! Have you created Site Columns or list columns? You will need to use Site Columns for this to work. If you created list columns, you will want to re-create the columns as Site Columns and then you should be able to search for the managed property and use it in a filter.

[#12]

Thank you! I did them list columns. I will recreate as site columns in both sites.! This is great!

[#13]

Hi Susan,

Your tips are much appreciated! 

I did set up a global term group: News Categories, then Term Set: Professional Development, terms: Instructions, Training, Tutorials.

Then I proceeded to set up site columns in two separate sites using managed metadata column type. 

Then on the main site, I used a filter using managed property using owstaxIdProfessionalx0020... "contains" - "Training", etc. 

Nothing came up?  I wonder because of the Hub Site settings?  What did I overlook? 

Thanks!

 @Susan Hanley 

[#14]

@renevisco Make sure you have selected both sites as a source for your query and then also make sure that you have created content and applied the metadata and published the pages. You actually have to use the metadata or it won't get picked up. You may want to try re-indexing the site as well.

[#15]

Hi Susan,

I'm actually mystified that I was not able to reproduce the crawled managed properties on News Web Part coming from two sites.

Both sites have the same managed metadata column.  I created a global term set and applied it to managed metadata columns on both sites. 

Global Group Term Set

 Managed Metadata Column

 

Professional Development Topic on Managed Property filter part in News web part. 

Yes, I did reindex both sites.  What did I overlook?  Any help is much appreciated! 

@Susan Hanley 

[#16]

@renevisco  Did you map the terms in the search schema to an available property? You may need to do that first to be able to refine on your custom property.