Announcements - How do I see them in this new network?

Steel Contributor

@Mark Kashman recently posted a huge announcement for SharePoint & Groups.  Thankfully he posted on Yammer since that jumped right out at me - he included the link for the announcement on this new network that I had never seen or was notified about.

Perhaps I am doing something wrong - but how can I set myelf up to see these big announcements from all the product teams like I was able to do by joining a group in Yammer?

 

19 Replies
Hi Adrian. Good to see you join the network.
In this network are Communities and the subset of discussions are in Spaces. Spaces are where the conversations are held. You can subscribe to a Space to receive conversations via email. Look for the Ellipses ... menu on the Space title and choose subscribe. In my attached pic, I have subscribed already, so I see the Unsubscribe option.
There were some early teething problems getting the emails sent to Space subscribers. But I think it's working now.
Thanks Darrell - So in this case SharePoint is the Community and video (for example) is one of the Spaces? This unfortunately does not get me what I want. In Yammer I can join the SharePoint or Video group, but I don't want to get emails for every discussion. But when Mark makes an announcement, I do get an email and in Yammer I get a visual indication there is something to go look at. On the topic of visual indications, it took me 8 frustrating minutes just to find this thread again to respond to you. I am not seeing anything on this site that says someone responded to me etc. Is there a way to do that here? I don't want to have to go back to Outlook every time I want to find a discussion I am interested in.

Yes, it is a big change from the Yammer announcements feature we all benefitted from. So far I see the options are 

  1. Subscribe to a Space and get notification of all conversations. Much like belonging to a distribution list. 
  2. Reply to or subscribe to a conversation and get all responses to that conversation. 

It isn't clear to me yet whether being a member of a Space without subscribing to updates, will mean I can still receive announcements in a space. 

@Michael Holste, @Lana O'Brien @Anna Chu- might you have something to add here?

Hey Darrell and Adrian, 

 

Right now we are revamping how these work. You can subscribe to the Community and/or any of the spaces within. In regards to visual notifiers, you will receive a notification on your avatar (similar to Facebook) in the top right that you can click. Choosing 'notifications' will give you list of activity where you were mentioned, responded to, if people liked your content, etc. 

 

This notification alert should be ready by tomorrow. 

Hey Darrell, I missed one of your questions. You can subscribe to a space, but 'membership' only exists at the Community Level (one level up). 

 

-Mike 

Mike - what are your thoughts on the Yammer model where I don't subscribe to be notified about every conversation, but I still get announcement notifications for that group?

Is that a feature planned to be delivered here?

Hey Adrian, I agree that the 'announcement' style notifications are a super valuable tool for our Microsoft experts to be able to push out notifications without subscribing to every single post in the community. We are exploring how to provide similar experience here. 

Hey Adrian, I agree that the 'announcement' style notifications are a super valuable tool for our Microsoft experts to be able to push out notifications without subscribing to every single post in the community. We are exploring how to provide similar experience here. 

In IE11 (Win7 or 10), I don't see the ellipses on the Space menu, or next to the Conversation Options heading.  They are there if I hover my mouse, but they don't appear at all.  I do see them in Edge, so that plus this thread is the only reason I figured out how to subscribe and replicate the Yammer Daily Digest.

Hi Adrian. To put it simply, it appears to me that this new platform does not support the notion of "announcements", i.e. there are only plain posts, no matter how "authoritative" they are.

Am I correct?

Please take a serious look at this. If MS want us to 'live' here it really needs to be a place where MS can announce new products and features and engagement can take place around that.  Keep up the good work!

At this point (at least for the next 7 days) I am still getting my annoucements info from Yammer.  I understand some of them have been posted to this new network but I still have not seen/found them on this side.  That even includes the useful Weekly Roundup which I may have to rely on more than before since I am missing so many new feature announcements.

About Weekly Roundup, you can subscribe to that board. In this way, by default, you will get notifications when new threads are started.

I've noticed a post marked as 'Featured' - that may go some way to helping highlight Microsoft announcement posts

 

Indeed! We have the ability to Feature posts and to 'Float' posts so that they appear at the top of communities and spaces. This is our strategy at the moment as we investigate other ways to push important messaging. 

Fine! Can you please tell us where we can see such examples? I have not yet seen any of them...

Hey Salvatore, 

 

Here you can see that this SharePoint post is 'floated' at the top of the SharePoint group... meaning that it doesn't get pushed down when recent posts come in. 'Featuring' it means that it stays at the top of the larger SharePoint community in a similar fashion. We are working on some iconography or colored borders to show that this is happening. 

Here's a screenshot

I know you guys are doing the best you can with the tools you have, but this is a poor substitue for the Yammer announcement feature.  (Similar to Pinned conversations on most other form boards).  Over time these build up and you have a long list of pinned conversations.

(And if you look at the screen shot, I can't even read what the announcement is)

 

Now, if you gave me a way to subscribe to email alerts for these pinned conversations only in each group then I am getting closer to the Yammer method assuming someone is moderating what is pinned.