Sharepoint newsfeed is emty for external guest users

Copper Contributor

Hi, 

 

This is in SharePoint Online. 

 

I have a newsfeed on the frontpage that fetches news from multiple feeds/sites. The newsfeed works fine for all internal users. 

 

External/guest users on the other hand will only see this on the frontpage newsfeed:

sharepoint_news.PNG

All guest users have read access to both the frontpage and to all the newsfeeds/sites. If i manually navigate to the news I can read/see all the news.  So it's only the feed on the frontpage that dont work.

 

Feed setup:

- "All sites in this hub"

- No filters

- Enable audience targeting = off 

 

14 Replies

Hi@kjako ,

 

Are the guest users members of the Office 365 group or do they have access just to the SharePoint Site.

 

If you add a news webpart to one of the underlying sites that is connected to the hub site do the users see the news articles there? 


Andy

@Andrew Hodges  I experience the same problem. In my case it is 3 CommunicationSites, where one is Hub and the other 2 assosiated with the hub. Guest is invited with Read only access to all three Comm sites. Hub site got a News webpart that shows content from the other two Comm sites.

 

Guest can navigate two the other two Comm sites and sees all content on those. Only Hub News webpart that doesn't show any content for Guests.

 

My admin account can see the allocated content from the other two sites, in the Hub site News webpart feed.

@iwarzon @Andrew Hodges 

 

Hi,

 

I have also the same problem, I've looked a bit using Fiddler and discovered some interesting things.

To retrieve the news using the News web part, the site is using this url : /api/v1/news/sites/filtered?start=0&count=13

 

For an internal user, the response text will contain news articles / links created, no issues.

For an external user (guest), the response text will contain an error : 

 

{"HttpStatus":"InternalServerError","ErrorMessage":"Task #0 Faulted, HomeAPI ErrorCode: NoSearchTaskSucceeded_ForbiddenError, Message: Not a single search task succeeded.\r\n","ErrorCode":500000,"ErrorLabel":"NoSearchTaskSucceeded_ForbiddenError"}

 

Is it possible to help or do something so the news would be displayed for guest users as well ?

 

Thank you in advance

 

Hi @KevinAerts8709 ,

 

I suspect what is happening here is that guest users are treated differently when it comes to cross site permissions or there is a specific bug with the webpart/"Feature". 

 

Best way forward here is to log a ticket with Microsoft in the Office 365 admin portal and they will be able to tell you whether this is a "Feature" (polite term for "We didn't build that") or a bug and something they should fix.

@kjako I'm running into this same issue.  We have a hub site with news that is delivered to connected sites.  External visitors are in the Visitor group at the hub site, and are part of a custom group with custom permission levels at the connected sites (upload without delete).  

 

The external users don't see the news on the hub, nor on the connected sites.  

 

Were you able to fix this?  

 

Thank you. 

@Donna Steinwand The web part doesn’t utilize search for fetching the news. If you check Fiddler while the web part loads, there’s no request to the search API that’d get the news. In fact, the web part makes a request to https://northeurope3-sphomep.svc.ms/api/v1/news/sites?start=0&count=13 to fetch the news, which doesn’t return anything for guests. This was also confirmed by the premier support: The issue that you see here on the news web part is not related to overall search but to a specific call that is made by the web part. It uses a call that does not work with guest users. The current behavior is by design. The required code changes to change the behavior are outside the scope of a fix and can only be considered for the long term. At the moment there is no timeframe when this behavior will change.

@Bstensberg Thank you for getting back to me.  Would the highlighted content web part work?  I'll test it tonight, but using that web part allows me to select "news" from the hub.  Thanks again.  

Unfortunately I wouldn't know. Sorry.

@Donna Steinwand 

 

We have the same issue since approx. 10 days, also for the events web part.
It seems to work with highlighted content web part, the guest user can see all news, but it looks different then the news web part, the site name for example is missing. I have a ticket open @ MS Support since a few days, sure they will come up with this workaround.

 

I will let you know what response I got from there...

I think I can live with the highlighted content web part, depending on the layout of the web part, it shows the same information and I can also display events.
No response so far from MS Support since one week.
I got a response again yesterday that the next support level would be involved in this case.
Today I made a test again with a guest user and guess what? Events and News are rolling up again from hub associated sites in the web parts of the hub.
Hi there, so the issue seems to be fixed, I got the following feedback from MS Support:

"Glad to hear that we are able to see news posts and the events web parts. We have encountered lately with performance issues and it gets resolved. "
I have a Team site(no O365 group) which is a hub with news posts. On one of the site collection i tried the highlighted content to show news posts for guest users, but it is still blank. What was you configuration for highlighted contentwebpart