As this time of year is grey and boring, in any case in my Northern part of the world, I thought I’d brighten things up with some extravagant intranet promotion videos, where the design appears to be more important than the content. 😁
You can find them all by searching on “z-ott” (which is my code for Over The Top) in my collection but I have made a selection in this post.
You can look for the tag “z-ott” in the filter, but it is easier to search for it.
Make sure to log in to Vimeo so you can see the ones that are “not rated yet” as well! More on this phenomenon in a later post.
1. The Cube, from Singapore government
This video is 10 years old but has not aged a bit. The quest through the jungle and the old cellar is still a nice metaphor for finding information within a large organization. They need an intranet!
There is another, related, video from this organization in my collection.
2. Velux One, from a manufacturer of special windows
There were a number of similar videos around some 7 years ago, but only this one and the one from a British insurance company have survived on public media. (But please let me know if I am mistaken)
They all feature a rather hysterical voice-over, cats, a saurus of some kind, and lots of funny statistics.
3. The Loop, from a healthcare organization
The birth of a new intranet, taken literally!
4. Leroy Merlin, European DIY retailer
It is a bit long, but very interesting. It is a video game between a regular person and someone with “intranet glasses”. I have never seen this for a real intranet, it would be interesting though if you could see the serial number or available stock on screen while you walk the store. Is someone working on this?
5. Fred, from a German producer of medical products and medicines.
There is a LOT going on in this delightful teaser video. There’s Roy Liechtenstein, Andy Warhol, Superman, other references to comics, accompanied by American jazz age background music. The video is available in English, German, French and Spanish.
In my collection you will also find another one from this company, with even more arts & culture!
This is only a selection so please make sure you watch all of them!
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.
Since a few weeks I am also on Mastodon (@ellenvanaken@mastodon.social) and there I happened upon this question from @almostwitty:
“Does anyone know how to manage the SharePoint “News you might have missed” feature? Some people aren’t getting them and I have no idea why…”
I thought that was a great question, so I started investigating, including the regular News Digest option as well, since issues can occur there too. I focused on technical/functional reasons, reading “not getting them” as “not receiving them in their mailbox” rather than not understanding what they are about. (But there’s an explanation on how it works from Microsoft in this post as well!)
There are three levels where email newsletters can go wrong: organizational (because of settings or email issues), sender or recipient issues or actions. In the case of organizational issues, most likely the whole organization, or a specific part of it (e.g. a specific email domain or location), will not have receive the digest. In case of individuals who have not received it, the issue is harder to identify and solve.
A. Regular News Digest
This is a newsletter with a hand-picked selection of news, sent by a site owner (sender) to an email list or group of colleagues (recipients). You may want to check my earlier post “10 things to know about the SharePoint News digest” Always think carefully before you decide to send a News digest – not everyone likes to receive “even more stuff to read” from their organization!
In the following cases someone or more people may not receive it:
1. Organization: There has been an email glitch in your organizations Outlook/Exchange
Check with your Microsoft365 admins if this is the case. The glitch can affect all your organization, or parts of it, e.g. with a different email address.
2. Sender: You have exceeded the Outlook sending limitations
Check the sending limitations here. E.g. you have sent your newsletter to more than 500 people, of you have sent too many emails in one day. The limits appear to be lower for people who have been in the organization shortly and have no reliable reputation yet. Solutions may be to send the newsletter in smaller batches, to use organization-wide groups instead of individuals (any group that is in your Company Directory), or to send the newsletter from a different email address. (e.g. a department mailbox rather than your personal email)
3. Sender: you have more than 256 characters in your subject line
This has happened to me when I first sent some digests, because I sent it to a lot of people who had never had any interaction with me.
Please inform colleagues that you are starting an email newsletter, monitor delivery of your first digest, train your colleagues how to add senders of in-company newsletters to their safe senders and ask them to check their Junk Email folder on a regular basis. It can also help to send the digest not from your personal email, but from an organizational account, e.g. Communications, or Department XYZ.
5. Recipient: Has deliberately blocked your email address, reported earlier newsletters as Junk and/or has set a Rule to send your mails to the Deleted Items
While option 4 is more or less an accident, this one is a deliberate action. There is no “Unsubscribe” option for SharePoint News digests, so every employee who is not happy to receive and read your mail will find ways to avoid it. Your digest will probably be in their Junk Email or Deleted Items.
It may be good to inform colleagues about the benefits of the News digests. Additionally you could train them how to add senders of in-company newsletters to their safe senders and to to check their Junk Email folder on a regular basis.
6. Recipient has accidentally deleted or archived the mail
Sometimes I do that too – I delete something by simply pressing the wrong button, swiping the wrong way, etc. Sometimes it is because I am interrupted while reading email, sometimes I decide too fast that this is not interesting, it can be anything really, and nothing personal! 😊
The email may be in the Deleted Items or in the Archive.
7. Recipient’s mailbox is full
Especially when your organization has many F3-licenses, it may happen that their mailbox (only 2 GB) is full and can no longer receive emails, even though the News digest is a small email in size. Check out the Quirks of the F3 license.
There’s not much you can do there. The recipient will have received one or more warnings to clean up their mailbox.
B. News you might have missed:
This is an automated digest of items that you have access to, may be relevant for you (according to the Microsoft Graph) but have not read yet. More info from Microsoft.
In this case, there are only organizational or recipient issues. People may not receive this for the following reasons:
8. Organization: it has been disabled on organizational level
Microsoft provides information on how to do that. You may want to discuss with the Microsoft365 admins (and others involved) to turn it on again, because there may have been a good reason to disable the functionality.
9. Organization: There has been an email glitch in your organizations Outlook/Exchange
(Similar to 1.) Check with your Microsoft365 admins if this is the case. The glitch can affect all your organization, or parts of it, e.g. with a different email address.
10. Recipient: There is no news that they have missed
They may have read all there is to read. That may be because they have been a colleague for only a short time and does not have access to many sites yet.
11. Recipients have turned off their subscription in the email or on their SharePoint page
This is ON by default. At the bottom of the email there is a link called “Notification settings” that takes you to a page in the SharePoint homepage where you can disable this digest.
You can disable this automated digest here.
You can also do this from the SharePoint home page by clicking the gear wheel > Email notification settings.
On the SharePoint landing page you can also turn off this digest.
In both cases, you will go to the below page where you can toggle off the button at the bottom.
If you do not want to receive “News you might have missed” you can set this button to “Off”
12. Recipient: Has deliberately blocked noreply@sharepointonline.com, reported earlier digests as Junk and/or has set a Rule to send mails from this sender to the Deleted Items
(Similar to 5.) This is a deliberate action. The digest will probably be in their Junk Email or Deleted Items.
You may want to inform users that blocking noreply@sharepointonline.com is not a good idea, as they will also not receive other mails about their SharePoint sites and documents. (e.g. auto-deletion of Teams recordings) Creating awareness about this email may be good idea, as is teaching them how to disable the “News you might have missed” email instead, as explained in 11, if they really do not want it.
13. Recipient has accidentally deleted or archived the mail
(Similar to 6.)
The email may be in the Deleted Items or in the Archive. Again, creating awareness about this email may be a good idea, and you may also want to teach them how to disable it properly if they do not want to receive it.
14. Recipient’s mailbox is full
(Similar to 7). The mailbox of F3-licensed users (only 2 GB) may be full and can no longer receive emails, even though this is a small email in size. Check out the Quirks of the F3 license.
There’s not much you can do there. The recipient will have received one or more warnings to clean up their mailbox.
Conclusion
There are many reasons why someone does not receive a SharePoint News digest or a “News you might have missed” digest. The reasons can be on organization, sender and recipient level, and may be deliberate or accidental. That makes it hard to troubleshoot, but I hope I given you a few ideas to start with. Good luck!
By now it is 16 things, because posts with numbers are cursed, as my fellow bloggers will know 😁
In the mean time I have learned a few more things, so it is time for an update.
1. The news publishers in your organization may appreciate guidelines
With all the options SharePoint has to offer, in web parts, columns, fonts and font colours, you may want to provide your News publishers with a few writing and design guidelines. This will help create some consistency across your intranet. I have shared my last organization’s guidelines in an earlier post: Writing SharePoint news posts (our way). This post was pretty popular so I guess it fills a need.
Using an image from Web Search and Upload will create a new folder and file in your Site Assets library. All other options do not.
You have most control using Upload or Site, as you will know where the image is stored and you will be able to re-use it easily
Stock Images and Organizational Assets are the best options when you care about respecting intellectual property, assuming someone is in charge of maintenance of Organizational Assets
Whether the News is published in a Classic Team site, a Modern Team Site or a Communication site, as explained in this post.
5. The Description field can be used for several purposes
The Description is a field that you can find in the Page Details. It is easily overlooked, and you do not have to use it, but it can be quite powerful.
Create a summary of your post. This will be displayed under the title of the post and will show your readers quickly what the post is about. You will have to make an effort, as by default the first part of the body text will be displayed. The Description will also be shown in the Newsletter and in Search results.
Hide key words that will be used in Search results. It is best if you add these keywords as far to the bottom of the description as possible, to avoid it showing up in the news overviews.
Example of a summary: To the left, a custom summary of the post. To the right: The default description: the first paragraph which trails off.
6. You can add a publication date on the post or page itself
The publication date of a News article will be visible on the News web part, (if you have that enabled), but when you open a News post you do not see the publishing date. You may want to add the date from the web part settings in the header (1), then toggle on the “show published date” button (2) and then the date will be shown underneath the title and author (3). I have not found a way to enable this by default. Please let me know if there is an easy way to make this the standard. Adding the publication date is a good practice for intranet pages with a longer lifespan.
The web part settings is where you can make the publication date visible. By default it is off, unfortunately.
You can show the publication date in the News web part, as shown here, but this does not show on the News post by default.
This is the publication date on the published post.
7. You can manage comments on your posts and pages
Your readers can respond to posts by clicking the Like button or adding a comment. Notifications will be sent via email to you. If this gets a little overwhelming or distracting, my post 4 ways to manage comments on SharePoint news or pages may help you.
8. If you are publishing “on behalf of” an Author, here’s some ways to redirect comments to them
By default, Likes and Comments are sent to the person who has published the post. There is no standard option to redirect them to the person who is the intellectual owner (as opposed to the publisher) of the post. I have come up with a few workarounds in this post: Diverting SharePoint news comments to the Author.
9. In some cases you will NOT see “See All” on the News web part
Sometimes the “See all” link, which you will need to see more news items and in order to create a Newsletter, is not visible:
When you have less than 5 published News posts
When you use the Hub News display
When you have hidden the “Title and Commands” in the web part settings.
If you toggle the “Show title and commands” off, the items News, See all and Add in the top bar will not be visible on the page.
10. The Carousel display still has usability limitations
Even Microsoft, who are big on inclusive design, have not managed to come up with a good Carousel. It also does not display any indication of the content of the article apart from the title. You can read my rant in this post: Can you get a text preview in a SharePoint News Carousel?
An example of a Carousel.
As SharePoint is evolving, we keep finding out more and more things about it, so please stay tuned and keep asking me questions, so SharePoint Holmes and I can investigate!
I recently got the following question: “Is it possible to get a text preview from News in a Carousel? This would be for those users who want to see more than just the title, but without clicking.”
I love this type of questions, so I decided to find out.
Carousels and me
I am not a big fan of Carousels. I can imagine the large images look nice, but I have read too many negatives. The quick why? This website: https://shouldiuseacarousel.com/
They do not provide good usability, for instance:
People tend to overlook them.
Most people do not spend enough time on a page to see all the items in the Carousel, so generally only 1 or 2 posts are being seen by most visitors.
The buttons to move them forward are too small and not easily clickable for people who have problems with their motoric skills.
Screenreaders cannot deal with them.
At the bottom of this post I have added a number of articles.
When Microsoft introduced a Carousel for SharePoint News, I honestly thought that they had solved the issue because why would they, who are pretty big on usability and accessibility, introduce functionality that would not have a good usability? But when I saw the product, I noticed that it just looked like all others. I could not find a usability review by anyone. (Please let me know if you know one).
BTW, I really love the below image (from Microsoft’s Inclusive Design pages) to show that inclusivity issues are more common than you might think. Not everyone has a permanent issue, but many people have temporary or situational issues. A small part of the population is blind, but many people have eyesight issues, including myself before my cataract operations – I had problems with colour contrasts and very small print, for instance.
The Microsoft Inclusive design Persona spectrum. I LOVE this.
But I digress! The question was: Is it possible to show a preview of the post, and not just the title, in a Carousel?
I checked a number of items:
1. News web part
I started out with changing my Intranet site’s News web part to Carousel. This is what the Carousel looks like in Edit Mode:
Edit mode for the News web part, when selecting Carousel
You can determine the number of posts to show (recommended is max. 5, but you can go to 8)
You can change to the next item automatically (not recommended) and set the interval for change.
You can show a call to action. We will come back to that later.
So, there is no option in the Carousel itself to make extra information, such as the Description field, visible. On to the next option.
2. News post
The next step was to open one of the posts and see if there is any option for an extra text, image description or anything that could be shown in the Carousel.
In the web part menu, you can add “Text above title” where you can add 40 characters of text, so I did. It is immediately shown. I also added an Alt Text for the image.
Edit mode for the news post, with options
3. Page Details
Then I looked at the Page Details, changed the Description into a snappy summary and added a Call to Action with a link to a Form. More on the Description field in this post.
Publishing the end result
So, I have 4 possible options to display:
Description
Text above title
Alt text for the image
Call to Action
I republished the page and looked eagerly which of the items would manifest itself on the News page.
Nothing. Zero. Zilch. It still just showed the title. Hovering over any element (image, title) did not show anything. 😥
The Carousel after adding all the extra’s and republishing. Sadly, none of the additional items are visible.
The Description is only visible in the web part layouts Top Story, List and Side-by-Side.
“Text above title” is only visible on the news post itself.
Alt text for the image is only available on the news post itself, in the Immersive Reader
The Call-to-Action does not show up, and the text and link in the Page Details are deleted after publication, so I guess this does not work. I added a Call-to-Action web part, hoping that it perhaps needed this nearby, but nothing. I will look into that; I remember a discussion on Twitter but forgot between whom.
Conclusion
I think it is currently NOT possible to show a preview, neither by default, nor by hovering over an element. If any of my readers have found a way to do it, please let me know!
Suggestions
At this moment I can only suggest using another web part layout, such as Top Story, List or Side-by-Side. Use the Description text to provide a good summary of the article. This is better for usability and accessibility and would allow users to see what the story is about, so they know whether it is worth their while to click.
Top Story layout. This shows the post’s Title and Description.
In-person conferences are back! And while we all managed to attend a lot of conferences online with very few issues, it is great to be able to meet face-to-face again, get swag and rejoice or complain about the catering! 😁
A few months before the pandemic I wrote a post about using OneNote to capture screenshots of presentations. When you do not want to wait until the slides become officially available, you can quickly grab screens and add them to your notes, provided you have two devices. You can also use this at online meetings of course – just take a picture from your computer screen.
Additionally, I am adding an excerpt that you can use during the conference. You can download it as a PDF (and print and fold it), or use the image op top of this post.
“Can you help me? I have edited my SharePoint News post two days ago, but the old text is still visible on the News page, under the title. How can I update it?”
SharePoint Holmes had not had a request for help recently, so he was eager to jump in! 😁
The investigation
Not everyone knows that the text underneath the post title on a News web part is determined by the text in the Description field. You can find the Description field in the Page Details on the post or page in question. I recently wrote about the behaviour of this Description field.
On my site’s Homepage I changed the News web part into a List view. This shows a good portion of the Description text.
I created and published a new post.
The new post, with part of the first paragraph in the Description
I checked the Description, and it matched the text; it showed almost the entire first paragraph.
As expected, the Description matches with the body text.
I then made a change to the first part of body text, republished, and checked the Description field.
The Description field still contained the old text, and on the News page the old preview text was still visible.
New body text, but still the old Description.
I then manually changed the Description text into a short summary. I had to change it manually anyway, so I tried to improve it.
As I had to redo the Description text anyway, I thought I’d make it a one-sentence summary.
This is the new Description. I think it looks much better than a sentence that trails off halfway.
The solution
Unfortunately, the Description field does not update itself when you make a change to the introduction text of a news post or page. You will have to manually update it if you want to reflect any edits. Of course, this behaviour does not always have to be a problem. If you only make small edits, or edits in another part of the text, you do not necessarily need to change the Description.
But even if you do not need to change the text, you may want to change the Description into a snappy one-liner that immediately informs your audience about the essence of your post.
I accidentally I have also found #8: The Description field is shown in the Newsletter digest. Not unexpected, of course, but now it has been confirmed.
The Description is also shown in the Newsletter.
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 need 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.
Most organizations will have been working with Teams for about two years now. There was an explosion of usage early in the pandemic in March/April 2020. I remember getting tons of requests for new Teams, as many people thought you need a Team site for chatting and conferencing. 😒
Many of these Team sites have never been used, at least not in my organization. Of course, the Microsoft365 admin has a role in deleting obviously unused Teams, but that is not sufficient. Team Owners and users have their own responsibility in making sure they are in the right Teams, but I know very well that not everyone has, or wants to spend, the time to do a good review and cleanup. And sometimes they do not even know how to go about it! (The psychiatrists and therapists I worked with, were not all very digitally savvy)
So, in order to avoid confusion and mess in your colleagues’ Teams setup, and colleagues complaining that “their Teams is a mess and that is Microsoft’s fault”, please help them checking their Teams on a regular basis. There are many ways that you can make Teams work for you if only you spend some time on it.
I have created a simple housekeeping flowchart. I love flowcharts and it was a good way to test-drive Visio Online! The functionality is great, but I miss the “arrange nicely” option that is in the desktop version, so please forgive me if things are a bit askew. 😊
Underneath the flowchart you will find a more elaborate description with texts and screenshots.
Feel free to use this flowchart with your audience.
You will find some more detailed instructions and screenshots below.
Step 1: Review the Teams that you are a member of
You will find all your Teams in the left-hand rail of Teams. You can manage most Team-level actions by clicking the … next to the Teams name and selecting the desired action from the popup.
The 2 Teams in my tenant.
The Team actions, with highlights on the ones that are relevant for this post
Is the Team still in use?
For each Team, first check if it is still in use. If not, you can Leave the Team and it will no longer be in your list. If you are the Owner of the Team, please Delete the Team, except when the Team has Private or Shared channels. In that case, please check with the owner and users of those channels, as those are managed differently than the regular channels.
Update 16-11-2022: You can also Archive the Team and make it read-only. This can be an intermediate solution when you want to keep the info from an important project for some time, or when someone is afraid to delete the Team altogether. My personal experience is that nobody ever looks at an Archive, so you may as well just delete the Team, but not everybody knows that yet 😁. Instructions for archiving. Thanks to Thierry Barthel for pointing this out.
Do you still need to be a member?
❌ If you have changed jobs since you were added to this Team, you may no longer need this. Or perhaps the project in this Team has been completed or stopped, or any other change may have occurred that makes this Team no longer relevant for you. If you do not need to be in this Team anymore, Leave the Team.
❓ If you do not know, you can Hide it. The Team will then be moved to the bottom of the list of Teams, under Hidden Teams. You can occasionally check if something has happened by clicking on the Hidden Teams and checking the Team. If the Team is useful after all, you can unhide it by clicking … next to the Team’s name and selecting “Show” from the popup.
The Demo Team is hidden and no longer clutters my list of Teams, but can be made visible easily
Alternatively, you can keep it where it is and check now and then whether you still need this. It may be a good idea to collapse the channels so you only see the Team’s name. You do this by clicking the little triangle to the left of the Team’s name. To reverse this, click the triangle again.
Teams expanded, so you see the channels that are not hidden)
When you hover over the Teams names, you will see the triangle to expand or collapse the Teams.
✅ If this Team is still relevant for you, please check the channels as in Step 2. If you have many Teams, you can drag the most important Team(s) to the top of the list by selecting the Team name. By default, they are sorted in order of creation.
Step 2. Review the channels in the remaining Teams
If you are certain this Team is important for you, check each channel in this Team. You cannot leave a channel, but you can hide it to make it less visible (except the General channel). It is also possible to mute notifications.
You can manage most channel-related actions by clicking the … next to the channel name and selecting the desired action from the popup.
The channel actions, with highlights on the ones relevant for this post
You will have the following options:
❌The channel is not important Please Hide it. Once there is a new message, the channel name will show in bold letters, but if you have hidden the channel, you will not see that until you click on “Hidden channels”. You can also decide to turn off notifications.
When there is a new message in a hidden channel, you only see it when you click on “x hidden channels”. 3 channel names are bold, so there are new posts.
❓You do not know yet whether this is an important channel. Just leave it there until you know. You can also Hide it to see if you are missing something and decide to turn off notifications.
✅The channel is important. Make sure you can easily find it and get notified whenever something happens in the channel. You can Pin it to the top of your Teams list so you can quickly find it.
A Pinned channel on top of the list, so I can easily find the most important one. 😊
With the Notifications you can make sure you will quickly know when something has been added or you have been mentioned. You will set notifications for all your Teams and channels in your Teams settings, (click the … top right of your Teams app, next to your name, and select Settings > Notifications) There are quite a lot of options so please check it out yourself. You can deviate per channel where necessary by using the Channel notifications in the channel actions popup.
Channel notification settings. You can set these in general in your Teams settings, and individually per channel where necessary.
Hopefully this is a good first step for most colleagues! You may want to remind them once a year that they should spend some time reviewing – once Teams have been set up properly, it will most likely only need a small revision.
My former colleague recently asked me how to add metadata or tags to SharePoint news or pages, in order to be able to make them link to a certain common topic, and be able to find them in Search.
My first thought was to add metadata to the pages in the Pages Library, but I quickly dismissed that thought as it would mean that every publisher would have to go into the library after publication to add their metadata. It would also mean that every Page Library would have to have those fields added and back-filled and oh well, I got tired just by thinking about the implications! 😄
But then we remembered that we had once added something on the page, “somewhere in a popup to the right”. I started investigating.
It turned out that the place to look for is the Description field. You can find it by clicking on the link “Page Details” during or after creating a new post or page.
There are a few things to know about this field.
1. The Description field is almost on top of the popup
It is directly under the thumbnail of the header image.
After clicking on Page Details (1) the popup will open and you will see the Description (2).
However, the popup often opens “in the middle” so you need to scroll up to see it.
If the popup opens like this, please scroll up!
2. The Description field is auto-populated after publishing
It will be populated with the first 255 characters of the body text.
SharePoint will tell you how many characters you have left.
3. You can change or remove the text after publishing
Now why would you want to change the description text manually? Items 4 and 5 will provide the answer!
4. The text in Description is shown in the News web part
Rather than having a text that suddenly ends in the middle of a sentence, you may want to edit the Description to provide a good summary to your readers.
The number of characters displayed is depending on the configuration of the web part, e.g.
If you have no image, you will see more characters than with an image.
If your News is in a page-wide column, you will see more characters than when it is one of three columns.
Hub, Carousel and Tiles layouts do not show descriptions.
In the red-lined example, we can remove all text behind the ! in the Description and have one proper sentence.
This preview is not relevant for pages, as these are not shown on web parts.
5. The text in Description is shown in Search results
When you have executed a search, in all of Microsoft365, SharePoint or your site, the Description text will show in the Search results, at least the text around the keyword.
Please compare this screenshot of a news web part, where the word “peregrine” is only
In the title
In the body text
In the Description
In a different text web part
To this screenshot of a search on the word “Peregrine” in the Microsoft365 homepage search box. The numbers correspond to the list above.
The search word ‘peregrine” is in various places in the news posts, but they will all turn up in search.
Please note that I have filtered the search for News, to avoid that the various images that have been auto-uploaded to the Site Assets library during news creation, clutter the list. How was it again with images in SharePoint news? This post will tell you all.
6. The text in Description is searchable
From the screenshots you can see that the keywords can be on various places on the page, but the posts all turn up in Search. This means that you can add keywords or metadata in the Description, without having to use that text in the title or body of the post or page.
For News, you’d best add the keywords at the bottom of the field after the summary text, so you do not show the keywords alone in the news preview. My news post 3 only has “peregrine” in the Description, and it makes a meagre preview on News.
For pages, you want to make sure that you have a good text for Search, but you do not need to worry about any preview.
Please note that I chose the word “peregrine” in my example because I have not used it before in this tenant. In real-life you will get more search results so you may need to filter.
7. The text in Description is not dynamic
When you are editing your post after publication, the description will not be adjusted. This does not have to be an issue, but you need to be aware, especially when you have edited the first paragraph of your post. My post SharePoint Holmes and the not-so-dynamic Description tells you more.
You can leave the description as is, replace it with the new intro, or even better, replace it with a summary of your post so your readers get the gist immediately!
8. The Description shows up in Newsletter
It will be no surprise, but just to be complete. The Description is also displayed underneath the title in the SharePoint Newsletter.
9. The Description is essential for selecting the correct template
According the comment below by André, the description field is crucial for page templates because the content of this is displayed in the dialog to choose a page template for editors. I don’t have a lot of experience with templates, so I am taking his word for it.
Conclusion
The Description field in the Page Details can be very useful in the following scenarios:
Providing a one-sentence summary of your news post on the News page(s) and Newsletters instead of the first words that trail off somew…
Making sure the post or page can be found in Search results. You can add the relevant keywords without having to add them to the title or the text. For instance, if it is related to a certain project or topic, but you do not want to use that word all the time.
Do you have other scenarios?
Are you using the Description field consciously or do you have another scenario where it comes in useful? Please let me know!
Of course, we all knew that Office365 would be renamed/rebranded into Microsoft365, but not when it would happen exactly. To be honest, I had forgotten a bit about it, thinking that Microsoft365 was the subscription to Office365 + additional enterprise functionality. At Microsoft Ignite 2022 we learned that it will happen, and soon – from November 2022 onwards! Read more: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-365-faqs
I noticed the announcement on my Microsoft365/Office365 homepage, and as I have had many new followers recently, I thought it might be nice to share my collection of Homepages over the years so they can see how this page has developed. Enjoy the nostalgia! 😁
Over time I have captured the various appearances of the Office365/Microsoft365 Homepage. As you may know, I quite like this page as the page where I start work.
That page is updated quite frequently, and I keep all versions in this post. Please scroll down and get some nostalgic feelings. 🙂
Update October 2022 👇
As announced during Microsoft Ignite 2022, Office365 will be renamed Microsoft365. We knew this for more than a year, but it was unclear how exactly and when this would happen. Now we know: “In the coming months, Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows will become the Microsoft 365 app, with a new icon, a new look, and even more features.” This will start from November 2022. Microsoft FAQ.
The announcement is on the homepage now. And compared to the December 2021 update, I now have recommended posts, and colourful…
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