How to force news to specific groups of employees

[kenneho]

Hi.

For our upcoming intranet landing page, our team have received two feature requests:

1. The page must have a news widget with news from (among others) each employee's own department.
2. If possible, we'd like the news feed to display news articles from the department only. In other words, in this particular news feed, Alice would get news only from site A, while Bob would get news only from site B. 

I assume that the latter feature request isn't possible out-of-the-box, but to explorer some potential workarounds, let's discuss some possible routes....

Solving the first feature request, I'm thinking audience targeting would be the best choice, assuming that the whoever generates the department's news article set the correct target group for their stories. Alice would get news articles from Site A. But the news feed would include a lot of other news articles as well, which doesn't comply with the second feature request. 

Another approach might be to create a simple (powershell) script that, if possible, on behalf of each employee virtually hits the "Follow site" button one each employee's department site. This would probably solve the first feature request, but not the latter.

A third option would be to create a custom web part, that based on the employees group memberships calculates which news sources to fetch news from. 

These options either doesn't fulfill both feature requests, of it requires custom development. 

Have other SPO organizations had a similar feature request, and found a working solution that don't require to much custom development?

[#2]

@kenneho for requirement 1 consider having a hub site with a main intranet site and then associated site for each department. Then news from each department can flow up to the hub site. We do this with our intranet which has about 10 sites that feed news up to it. You can see the site in blue in the image below:

For requirement 2 make sure that audience targeting is turned on in the news web part. Divide your staff into their departments and you can then target news at them. I'll have to point you to a page where there is more info as at the moment we are not using audience targeting: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/overview-of-audience-targeting-in-modern-sharepoint-sites-6...

Rob
Los Gallardos

Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User

[#3]

@RobElliott , thanks for your reply!

Regarding requirement 2: Using audience targeting would get us a long way, but as this would - assuming I haven't missed something - clutter the news feed with articles from a lot more than just a single news source (such as news only from the current user's department), this option won't fit the current requirement.