SharePoint News Enhancements – March 2019

SharePoint news is a content distribution system that works across personal, team and organizational news. News articles and links can be composed on browser or mobile platforms, and are easily surfaced in portals, Microsoft Teams, email, Microsoft Search and more.   Rich new capabilities will empower communicators to keep groups, departments, and divisions up to date easily.

Let’s dive into each feature.

News – organize. Within the news web part, you can now organize your news posts to appear in custom order. This means you can highlight high-value content knowing it is more visible among articles published on a site.

Figure 1 Controlling the news display sort order
Authoritative news - News can come from many different sites. But you might have "official" or "authoritative" sites for organization news. When these sites are specified as organization news sources, posts from these sites are interleaved throughout all news posts displayed for users on SharePoint home in Office 365, or via the news tab in SharePoint mobile. They are distinguished by a color block on the title as a visual cue.  Admins can manage news sources using simple PowerShell commands, referenced below.

Figure 2 Site showing authoritative organization-wide news
News notifications from followed sites – Starting in March 2019, users that follow sites will start to get notifications for any news posted on those sites. They will also get notifications when people they work with posted news.  And soon, news notifications can be delivered over email as well.  It’s never been easier to stay up to date with information from key areas of your intranet.

Page templates.  You've created a great page, and you want to make it available for others to use as a starting point for their pages. Or, you need to create a page, but aren’t sure where to start.  Page templates can save time.   

Initially, we’ll ship three page templates – basic, text-centric and visual, as shown below.  You can also create your own templates from existing pages.  Once a page is saved as a template, it can be chosen from the Template gallery as users create pages and news. 
Figure 3 SharePoint page templates


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