Forum Discussion
New Feature: SharePoint Auto Digest Email MC215356 - no admin control!
SharePoint News is a great feature, however we have many clients where an auto digest email of missed news is not appropriate. Some use SharePoint Online without utilising the News pages functionality (in which case some still create News pages potentially generating digests), some have SPO activated in advance of adoption activities with users unaware of their new tool, others only use SPO with Teams etc. These emails will in such circumstances only create noise for users as well as support, and not having an admin option to disable this on behalf of users is disappointing.
Please consider up-voting this uservoice entry: https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-admin/suggestions/40623631-admin-controls-required-for-new-feature-sharepoin
12 Replies
As a communications professional managing our company's news, it is BEYOND frustrating that I don't have the ability to either turn it off, or control the output. We have a biweekly newsletter highlighting news in the company and this is in direct conflict of the work, effort, and strategy we put behind this. It is VERY confusing for our employees to receive this auto generated newsletter from SharePoint.This needs to be optional.
VegardStromsoy you probably already know, but there is good news, you can disable it. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/automatically-sending-news-post-digests-b930b579-0de5-4c67-86f0-de64b87c45e3?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us
- agreed this is unacceptable, we need to be able to control what is sent to our users.
Fully agree... we use O365 for many things, but not for news provisioning. Over the years we have experienced several times already how confusing these kind of features can be for end users. Administrator and product owners must be able to make their own choices in these matters. It has nothing to do with a dislike of functionality, but all to do with corporate standards and ways of working.
To me, the fact that Microsoft is still rolling out features without the appropriate administrator controls shows either a gap in their feature design template (Q27: "Do we need administrator controls for this feature?" Default value: 'Yes'), or a serious misunderstanding of a large part of their customer base. These days, the digital landscape of any given company runs on more than just Microsoft products (yes... RL staring back at you, MS 😉 ).VegardStromsoy I might be wrong, but I think this message centre email said that this was just for users who had 'followed' a site. I am reading this as the user needs to have gone in via M365 waffle menu to 'SharePoint' and clicked the star icon which in my experience most normal users will not have done in most scenarios as they will have either gone straight to Teams, followed a link or favourite to a team site or from their company home communication site. Certainly if setting up SP in advance of adoption activities, I would think this is unlikely.
I'm not sure if this gives a little more comfort over signal versus noise for users, but I get that having admin ability to turn it off might be better for all scenarios
Gavin_Jones the announcement mentions users will get news to unread sites they have access to and won't see news on sites they don't have permissions to.
RocioA Correct 🙂
"Users will start to receive a weekly mail from SharePoint Online containing news that that [sic] they have not yet read based on sites that they are following."
And, "users will have access to all the news posts that they are sent so rest assured that users won't see news that they don't have permission to see"
- There is no mention of following in the announcement, agree that it would have made it less of a problem if it did.
VegardStromsoy Oh, there was in the email I got (attached), although not particularly emphasised
VegardStromsoy
What a horrendous idea. Need to make this optional.- Totally agree. In our org we are setting up our own alerts through Power Automate. People are not familiar with automated mails from Microsoft / SharePoint and would treat them as spam.
Upvoted.
