SharePoint Holmes and the Lost Link (to the News digest)

Another occasion where SharePoint Holmes saved the day.

The situation

“I need to send out a News digest today for my colleague and she showed me how to do it, but it does not work for me” I heard on the other side of the Teams call. “It is our Christmas Newsletter and my colleague is already out for the holidays”.

Of course one calls the support desk rather than another colleague when this happens 😊. And as I was quite busy in the end-of-year period, I thought I’d call in SharePoint Holmes. Usually this was a quiet time for him and I expected that an interaction was welcome. Especially a “it does not work for me” as that can be really anything. So on went my sleuthing hat!

The investigation

We shared screens. She opened the site where the News was published, and showed me the items that needed to go into the Christmas digest.

I noticed there was a “See All” link top right, so apparently the web part was configured correctly, and more than 5 items were published. That was not the problem.

The News web part that is the source for the news digest . There is a “See All” link top right.

She clicked on “See All” and the next page opened.

Hmmm, there were no “Manage Posts” and “Email a News digest” links. A page refresh did not help. That was strange.

The page where you normally see “Manage posts” and “Email a news digest”. But not here.

I looked at one of my own sites and compared it to hers.
I asked her to go back to the Homepage. There were no options to add News or something else. (as in the first screenshot in this post)
I asked her to click on the Gear Wheel. That showed only a very small menu.

The site settings only has a few options. I expect this person is a Visitor and has too few permissions.

Ah, I got it. Permissions!

The solution

In my admin role, I checked permissions for the site in question. And as I expected, she was a Site Visitor, not a member.

You can only create a News digest when you have permissions to add a new Page to the Site Pages library, and add images to the Assets library. It is in the Microsoft support, by the way, but I only learned that later.

Due to the absence of any other Site Owners, I made her a Member and sent a note to the Site Owner that I had given her more permissions in order to create a News digest. I hoped the Site Owner would remember that for next time…
I stayed in the meeting and looked while she created the News Digest. After a page refresh the permissions were OK and she knew what to do.

SharePoint Holmes saved Christmas! 🌲😁

Happy holidays for all my blog readers. All the best for 2023!

About SharePoint Holmes:
Part of my role was solving user issues. Sometimes they are so common that I had a standard response, but sometimes I needed to do some sleuthing to understand and solve it.
As many of my readers are in a similar position, I thought I’d introduce SharePoint Holmes, SharePoint investigator, who will go through a few cases while working out loud.