After the recent updates for publishing SharePoint News and creating a Digest, I also wanted to create an update for readers. This post follows on my post “10 things to know as a SharePoint News reader“. We keep on learning!
1. There are various places where you can find your saved-for-later posts.
When you do not have the time to read a news post right now, or when you want to keep it for later, you can save it for later. Click the icon. But where to find those saved items, when you are finally in bus or train or on your sofa? There are at least 5 places where you can find it:
- Microsoft365 Homepage
- SharePoint Homepage
- SharePoint mobile app
- and more!
You can read all about it in this post: Where do you find news posts saved for later?
2. You can filter for News posts in the Search results
Type in a search word in the box on top (make sure you are in the correct “scope”: all M365, this site, this hub, this library).
On the results page you will see a number of “verticals”, or content types, such as Files, Sites and News. You will easily recognize the News posts in the overview by their icon: a folded newspaper, but you can also click on the News tab and see only News.
3. Please warn the author when you see a post with a greyish thumbnail and no header image
It will probably look like this:
The header image may be deleted, moved or you do not have access to it.
This can also be a Linked Post that has been deleted. The image will disappear after a few days. This will be the case when, after clicking on the post, you get a message “Hmmm…can’t reach this page”. See my post “SharePoint Holmes and the Missing Message“.
You may want to warn the author that there is no thumbnail visible and ask them to check.
A grey image is always an error. If they have deliberately not used an image, the post will look different on the News page:
4. You can unsubscribe from News you may have missed
“News you may have missed” is an email that shows you News that may be interesting for you, based on the Microsoft Graph, but that you have not read yet. This is a controversial functionality and I wrote about it earlier. This is an organizational setting that we could not turn off fast enough in my last role 😁, but in case you do not like it and your Microsoft365 administrator has not disabled it, you can do so yourself.
Go to the SharePoint landing page, click the gear wheel top right and select “Email notification settings”. On the next page, uncheck the button at the bottom of the list. It should look like the screenshot below. You setting will be saved automatically.
Please let me know if you know more “gotcha’s” for SharePoint News readers!
Ellen's Digital Workplace 
Hi Ellen,
Two questions:
1) Is there a way to flag a news post as New? I’ve seen how to add text to the news post template, but I want my viewers to see that it is a New news post from the homepage.
2) is there are a way to flag a news post as Mandatory or Must Read? For example, can I flag it on the home page as a text flag (similarly to the New flag requested above) and also can I then add a button etc within the news article template to encourage the viewer to click to show they have read and understood the message and to capture the viewers details to show they have read it?
Both these options used to be available on my old SharePoint 2016 site but not on the new SharePoint Online site. Thanks
Hi Richard, interesting questions!
I am afraid SharePoint Online does not have that (yet). I can relate to the “New” flag, but I am afraid the only thing you can do is to teach readers to look at the publishing date, and for publishers to Boost a post if it is really important. The default order is newest on top, so that should help users.
As for the Mandatory, I know of an app called DocRead for SharePoint which asks and tracks reading of mandatory documents, but if a News item (page) is considered a document for DocRead, I do not know.
My personal opinion is that reading News should not be mandatory as my experience is that people do not consider News to be very essential to their day-to-day work. They do understand that some documents are Must Reads, such as policies and protocols, but not News. But that be my experience only.
Hope this helps, best regards,
Ellen