Modern SharePoint News Subscription

[Matt Janssen]

Is there any way to subscribe to SharePoint News - an Alert Me style functionality?  On our current SharePoint portal, users can subscribe this way to list-based news so that they get a daily email with links to the news articles.  Users love this functionality so much that even though the new News functionality is also loved, the ability to subscribe has been a blocker to using it.  Any suggestions?

[#2]

You would have to use flow to do it, but I am now using subsites for news too that rollup, so it's not really an option. They are working on that last I heard, but we are probably looking at this summer or after ignite to hope for anything like that built in. Until then, really doing a flow is the only way on your pages list where your news goes. You can filter based on that promoted state = 2.

Maybe even create a subscribe list and use that for recipients that get that alert so you can build out just one flow for the notifications and just have users sign up for a list.

[#3]

Notifications and subscriptions to SharePoint news are coming, no ETA yet AFAIK

[#4]

Hi Matt,

I frequently get the question about having emails sent out alerting all staff about news on our intranet. What do you mean by the subscription functionality blocking the news? Is that to be read that people skip going to the intranet altogether?

Cheers

[#5 · Accepted solution]

You can use the search result alert system.

Prepare a search result page using the basic built-in tenant resultset and apply the additional filter into.

The result webpart can give you the option of the "Alert Me" at the bottom of the page, and that one will allow the user to subscribe the news associated.

This option is only a work around, the MS official positioning is to start with the "SharePoint" Home page of the tenant which is collecting the news published across the tenant on which you have the permission to read.

Fab

[#6]

Thanks for the idea Fabrice, just used it to satisfy users wanting to setup alerts for all news articles so they can monitor what's going on.

[#7]

You can probably flag it as best response :)

Fab

[#8]

Can’t. Not my post ;)

[#9]

Lol, OK I did it for you and the initial requestor :)

Fab

[#10]

@Matt Janssen - When someone posts news today, people with the SharePoint mobile app, that are "working with" the author (based on the Microsoft graph) will be notified of that post. If you're a manager, peopple in your management chain also get notified. Similarly if the manager of someone you work with posts news, you'll see that too. We're constantly trying to improve our notification system and model, so feedback is always welcome.

You can read more in this post: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/SharePoint-mobile-notifications-kee...

Some examples of recent internal explorations are:

1. Adding followed sites as a signal that you want to get notified of ANY news posted on a particular site (this seems to be successful so far in our experimentation internally at Microsoft).
2. Falling back to an email notification, if the "should be" notified people the author works with (based on the graph), don't have the SharePoint mobile app installed.
3. Automatic news digests of news in your personalized feed on SharePoint home, if you haven't visited sp home or mobile within a certain period of time.

Would love to hear your thoughts on these and other scenarios to help you adopt SharePoint news.

fyi @Debjani Mitra

[#11]

I feel like I'm missing something....I don't see an alert option when I do a search.

[#12]

@John Sanders  RE: Your comment about "adding followed sites as a signal" - I'd imagine that already is a Graph signal (otherwise what is it for?), yet there's no way yet to utilize it to "personalize" news feeds. The ability to serve up news ONLY from sites people are following would seem an obvious option, but there's no way to do it. Is that something that's planned?

---

Some examples of recent internal explorations are:

1. Adding followed sites as a signal that you want to get notified of ANY news posted on a particular site (this seems to be successful so far in our experimentation internally at Microsoft).
2.  

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[#13]

I know this question is a little old, but I have the same question/problem, and I don't understand the solution.

I manage an unrelated enterprise financial application. We had a SharePoint site for our users, and we used to post announcements, which were archived there for future reference, and the users received alerts. It worked quite well.

Now with this new News App, still no subscriptions or alerts here in July 2019.
And I don't understand any of the solutions in this thread.
I'm not liking this new SharePoint.

[#14]

@Matt Janssen @Deleted @Juan Carlos González Martín @Kerstin Svanberg @Fabrice Romelard @John Sanders @Gretchen Hustad @matt howell @Wooderson 

Here is the work around we implemented when asked if this could be done. We leveraged the built in "Alerts" for the Site Pages.  In our usage we where setting up blog sites using the modern communication sites and the news functionality.  (I would love to have an actual subscribe functionality for each News Part and its related context, current or multiple sites)

To accomplish this I created two links in the navigation:

• Subscribe
  
  • URL: <SiteURL>/_layouts/15/SubNew.aspx?List={<ListLibraryID>}&Source=<SiteURL>
• Edit My Subscriptions
  • URL: <SiteURL>/_layouts/15/MySubs.aspx
    

Example URLS:

<a href="https://demo.sharepoint.com/sites/PresidentsBlog/_layouts/15/SubNew.aspx?List={B967F8B2%2D4806%2D45DB%2D9641%2D3B86E3C20B18}&Source=https://demo.sharepoint.com/sites/PresidentsBlog" target="_blank">https://demo.sharepoint.com/sites/PresidentsBlog/_layouts/15/SubNew.aspx?List={B967F8B2%2D4806%2D45DB%2D9641%2D3B86E3C20B18}&Source=https://demo.sharepoint.com/sites/PresidentsBlog</a>

<a href="https://demo.sharepoint.com/sites/PresidentsBlog/_layouts/15/MySubs.aspx" target="_blank">https://demo.sharepoint.com/sites/PresidentsBlog/_layouts/15/MySubs.aspx</a>

There are a few different ways to get the List/Library GUID the easiest being going into the List/Libraries Settings and pulling it from the bowser url.

With this implementation you now have a method for a user to add/modify "Alerts", without ever having to access the list/library directly. It is not as simple as a basic subscribe option but better then nothing and keeps them in the modern experience.

[#15]

@Damien SeeseThat's fine but many organizations (and mine) are trying to get away from email. I don't get why the followed functionality which is already there can't be given priority in the news web part so news from followed sites trumps other news. If a user explicitly follows a site surely that's an indication of their interests? If not, I have no idea what the purpose of "following a site is. Currently, following has the same weight as created date which is, well, a little daft. This is probably a matter of tweaking the Graph algorithms so followed content takes precedence over everything else.

At the very least, an option to display news from followed sites should be added to the news web part. This seems like a no brainer and hard to believe Msft has missed the boat.

[#16]

@matt howell - today if you select News source = Recommended for current user, we'll pull news for the page viewer. This includes news from people you work with, people in their management chain, and news from sites you follow. It is however still ordered still in recent order (not a weighted relevance ordering).

[#17]

@John Sanders Where is that "News Source" option? I'm also looking for a way for employees to pull information instead of us pushing it out to them.

[#18]

@Matt Janssen 

Hi Matt,

I have been looking at this post and have a question.  I managed to get a simple email notification set up but it seems to send the email as soon as the new news page is ADDED.  Is there anyway to send the email notification once the new news page has been POSTED.  I thought perhaps it would be in the section condition section where I only currently have Promoted State is equal to 2.  I thought perhaps I could add an AND and say when the news item is posted, but im not sure what string to use. 

Do you know if this is possible at all?

thanks

J

[#19]

@Damien Seese  But it is a news.aspx page => no ListLibraryID ! How do you solve this ?

[#20]

3 years later and still no subscribe functionality for published news posts? Has anyone had success creating a flow which sends emails to users who add themselves to a list? If so, can they share how they did it?