Did you know that SharePoint used to have internet sites? If you have been there from the start, or from about 2008 or so, you will know that, but if you started after 2015 you may not realize. So, as part of SharePoint’s 23rd birthday celebration, let’s talk about SharePoint and intERnet. And I am not talking about sharing sites and documents with your customers, suppliers or other business partners, but about real websites.
Brand and product sites
I do not know the exact dates anymore, but around 2009 we had a large project at the organization I worked for at that time. We had a successful intranet based on SharePoint (see My very first SharePoint intranet), and at that time you could use SharePoint also for internet sites. Management decided that we were going to move all our brand and product websites to SharePoint. We wanted to make the best use of our investment in Microsoft tools, have more control over the hosting and maintenance, and save money. We had a long-term partnership with a good, but very expensive web and brand design agency. They would still be responsible for the design and branding and action mechanisms. Everyone in Marketing and Sales was very upset as at that time it was fashionable to hate SharePoint. They were very afraid that “it would look like SharePoint” and that was the worst critique you could give a website. (Some people still have that attitude, but I guess they have not seen SharePoint for years 😉) The design agency was most dismissive, as “you could not build decent websites on SharePoint”. Of course. Our SharePoint support team was hesitant because they expected tons of questions from Marketing and Sales about maintenance and new requirements, especially about functionality that SharePoint did not have. (And the “I-told-you-so”s that would be the result)
I would love to tell you a story of successes or horrors, but I left the organization before the project was in full swing, so I am curious if it was ever brought to a conclusion. If they had done it, they would have had to change everything back a couple of years later, when Microsoft phased out the website options in 2015 because they realized that other parties could do a better job on internet and web sites. Do you have any real-life experiences from websites-on-SharePoint? Please share!
Personal sites in Office 365
When I started with my Office365 subscription in 2011, it came with an external site. As I have a “Small business plan” it was meant to promote my small business and services, but I have never put a lot of work in it. The site is no longer accessible from the internet, but I can still see and even edit it! It is in Classic SharePoint, so it does not look as nice as modern SharePoint and it is also less easy to manage. This option was discontinued in 2015.
This is the homepage of my former internet site. Please look at the URL. The message in red says “Reminder, this site will be deleted shortly. Click here for more info” and then I get an error message.
In the “Edit mode” (accessible via the gear wheel) you recognize Classic SharePoint.
The site in edit mode.
Libraries and lists, site settings are still there, and I could probably rework this into a Modern site, but it is easier to create a new one. 😁
External sharing
Of course you will know the options to share sites, documents, Forms etc. with your customers, clients, suppliers and other external business contacts. That has been around since around 2005 and has proven to be very useful. But it is not the same as an internet site where everyone can access.
As part of the preparation for this post I asked CoPilot about SharePoint and internet. The answer will be something for my next post. 😉
As SharePoint celebrated its 23 year birthday last week, as mentioned by Veronique Palmer and many others, I thought it might be nice to share my personal history with SharePoint.
The beginning: SharePoint 2001
The first version of SharePoint that I worked with, SharePoint 2001, was a document management solution. It was comparable to the current document library, but with very limited functionality and a different design. There were folders and subfolders, you could subscribe, you could set permissions per (sub)folder and that was it.
A document library from SP2001. Jussi Roine was also already active at that time! 😉
At the company I worked for at that time, we had developed our own “document cabinet” functionality on a different platform. It was just one flat list of documents with permissions on the cabinet level. We provided the SharePoint solution to “serious” users only: people who had experience with document and records management, such as research departments, quality control functions, finance etc. Everyone else, such as Communications or Marketing, had to make do with the document cabinets, as SharePoint was considered “too complicated” for “normal people”. Can you imagine? 😁
My first intranet: moving to SharePoint 2003
We had built an intranet around the year 2000 using our own document cabinets, a third-party Discussion Forum functionality and Frontpage webs. When we started to develop a new intranet for the organisation, we found out that the next version of SharePoint, SharePoint 2003, was something more than just document management. It was a complete intranet platform, so we could replace everything with SharePoint! It sounds very simple and obvious now, but at that time we were so used to building things ourselves that we were very confused at first. How would this work? How should we replace our Forums? Could we move documents from our cabinets to SharePoint? What would it mean to our developers? How could we inform people about this complicated new functionality? Despite making a few mistakes (such as wanting to replicate old functionality) we created a rather successful intranet on SharePoint 2003. I wrote about that here: My very first SharePoint intranet.
My second intranet: moving from SharePoint 2007
After that came SharePoint 2007, which had more functionality. After that, there was a split in SharePoint on-premises (the installed version on an organization’s servers) which has versions SP2010, SP2013, SP2016 and SP2019 (I do not think any versions have been added since) and SharePoint Online, which is the cloud version used by most organizations, I think.
I have worked with SharePoint 2007, struggling with storage space, and moved to SharePoint Online from there. I wrote about that here: My second SharePoint intranet.
My third intranet: moving to SharePoint Online
The third intranet project I was involved in meant moving to SharePoint Online from a very outdated non-Microsoft platform. By that time (2021) most employees were already familiar with SharePoint Online and the complete Microsoft365 suite. Combined with just a few requirements and a very good project manager, this was a model project completed in record time. I wrote about it in this post: My third SharePoint intranet.
So, I have worked with various versions in the years that I worked with SharePoint. And I still love it, it can do so much!
Next time, I will discuss the external capabilities of SharePoint. It used to be more than what you can do now. Did you know?
When you open my clothes cupboard you will see , from left to right: red, orange pink, purple, blue, white, grey and black. That is right: I organize my top garments (blouses, sweaters, jackets etc.) according to their colour.
Colour sends a very strong message, it is almost the first thing you notice when you look at something. Colour can also be used to highlight differences and similarities between entities.
So, I am very happy that it is now possible to change the colour of a folder in OneDrive or SharePoint. I think this can help with finding the content you are looking for.
Colour can give a very fast indication of the contents of a folder, but no more than that. It should not be your only organizing principle:
Some of your colleagues may have eyesight issues, so if they use a screenreader they may hear the name of the folder, but not the colour; they may be colour-blind (especially common for red/green colours), or they may suffer from cataracts, which may make it hard for them to distinguish colour nuances. Light red and light orange have little contrast between them, as have light green and light teal, and perhaps light purple and light pink.
Light can influence contrast, both the light in the room as the brightness of the screen.
A colour may mean different things to different people, for instance a favourite (or hated) football club. ⚽🏉
The colour sequence green-yellow-orange-red may confuse colleagues if used in a different context than meaning something like good, not so good, bad (or variations on that theme).
Colour is not specific enough to be a stand-alone attribute. You will still need a good folder name, and possibly a number and an emoji. (I wrote about the use of emoji earlier)
Light Green and light Teal may be difficult to distinguish from eachotherLight Orange and light Red do not differ that muchLight Pink and light Purple are quite close to one another
So, how can you use the colours to your best advantage? It depends….on the owner but mostly on the audience.
OneDrive
OneDrive is your own set of folders, so you can do whatever you like. You can create a rainbow, make all folders pink, use the favourite colour of the person you share a folder with, or apply the colour according to the app where the folder comes from. (Remember that Microsoft365 creates folders in your OneDrive when you use certain apps?)
This is the latter:
My OneDrive folder colours reflect the colour of the app they originated from (approximately).
So, whatever works for you.
SharePoint team sites
For SharePoint it is slightly different. Firstly, your OneDrive is one document library, and you will see your folders immediately. In SharePoint you will need to open a document library first to see the folders. Secondly, team sites are for collaboration, so colours may not be your decision alone. You will generally know the people working in this site, and probably meet on a regular basis, so you need to discuss what colours and labels and sorting principles to use for different folders, so that everyone understands what the folders are about. If there is a lot of employee turnover, you could add instructions about the use of colour.
SharePoint sites from Teams
In general, this works like SharePoint collaboration sites with a few gotchas, e.g. you can not change the colour of the General folder, and in some views the colours will not be shown. Please see Greg’s post! As with the stand-alone SharePoint site, you will want to discuss with your Team members which labels and colours you would like to use.
SharePoint communication sites
As these have a large and generally unknown audience, this is more of an “information sending” site. It will be more difficult to use meaningful colours, as they may not be obvious to your diverse and dispersed employees. Some explanation may be needed. On the other hand, I do not think many employees will go into your folder structure. I expect they will mostly access documents through Search and links in News items and on pages.
Still, there are few things you can do to make things easier:
You could use one colour per document library, so people know in which library they are, e.g. the Finance, HR or Communications library.
If you have one library for all departments, you can use one colour per folder for each department.
A coloured folder for each department publishing on the intranet.
It makes sense to agree on the distribution of colours over the departments in order to be as consistent as possible within your organization. So, all folders containing public Finance documents could be green, all folders containing public HR documents could be red, etc.
Even if it may not be relevant to the entire audience, it can be useful for editors – so your HR officers know they have to upload in red folders.
You can also give all folders in all public SharePoint sites your corporate colour, if available. (At his moment, you are limited to the 16 colours shown, so SaraLee’s red would be an option, but AkzoNobel’s dark blue would not.) That way people will know they are looking at corporate information. Does anyone know if you can create folders with another default colour than the yellow? I could not find that information.
Imaginary library for the Sara Lee intranet – every folder is created in the corporate colour by default. (Please note I don’t know if this can be done at all, and Sara Lee as a company no longer exists)
So, it may be small and trivial feature for some, but it can help people knowing where they are, as long as you use it with some caution.
A few more things to know:
Colour is not metadata so you cannot search, sort or filter on colour. So if you want all folders of a similar colour to be together, you may need to add letters, numbers or a prefix to the labels to get them together.
There is no bulk-changing available for folder colours. So in case you want to change colour for multiple folders to the same colour, you have to do it one-by-one.
You can not make bulk edits for the colour.
Unfortunately, you cannot change the colour of a document library. Those libraries will always have that yellow/brown colour. It would be nice if you could change that, too!
Are you using this?
Are you using coloured folders right now, and if yes, how? Please let me know in the comments! Much has been written about it, but I am curious to know how much it is being used.
Recently I was invited by Intranet Management (Italy) to talk about my video collection. I decided to choose “The Intranet Demo video” as my topic. This video type may be not as spectacular as some of the teaser videos in my collection, but the Intranet Demo video (where someone shows what the new intranet looks like, what content you can find and how to use it) is much more valuable, in my opinion.
Some reasons to create a Demo video for your new intranet
There are more benefits to the Demo Video. Not only does it create awareness (as does a teaser) for the new intranet, but it will also help people with actually using the intranet. When someone shows them how to work with the new intranet, it may help to lower the threshold to try it. Remember, not everyone is as computer literate as yourself! A good demo can therefore save the training departments (often HR, Communications and/or IT) some support time and effort. And its lifespan is much longer than that of the teaser, because it can also be used to introduce new employees to the intranet. A teaser is fun, and often very entertaining, but it is obsolete once the intranet has been launched. The teaser certainly has its uses, but as I have been at the IT-side of things, I think the Demo is more value for money.
If you have time or budget for only one intranet launch video, make it a Demo!
Do you really have to create a Demo video?
Someone asked whether an intranet should not be so intuitive that a demo is not needed? Well, a new intranet may be intuitive for some people, but you can not expect it to be intuitive for all. Some people simply need more help, or are coming in as a new employee who has been used to a different intranet platform. And especially when you have changed the design, layout, navigation and/or the platform all colleagues may benefit from an instruction on what has changed, and why and how. And where they can find their relevant content.
The Demo video is just ONE adoption tool
I think a Demo video should not be the only way to increase trial and adoption of your intranet. For some colleagues having a demo that explains the whereabouts of important content and the benefits of completing your profile will be sufficient, others will still need more help. This also depends on your organization: when I was working for multinational marketing & production companies, most people were pretty computer literate. In my last job however, which was in a mental health care organization, colleagues were “working with people, not with computers”. Some of them panicked when they had to store documents on their OneDrive instead of on the Downloads drive. So we had to spend more time and effort making things easy for them.
So, you will always need more tools: webinars or other online sessions as well as classroom training or personal help.
Please share your Demo video
I have seen many nice Demo videos, but have not seen the perfect one yet. Have you created a Demo video when your intranet was (re)launched? Please let me know where it can be seen…or upload it to YouTube or Vimeo.
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!
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.
K: “Hi Ellen, can you post this on the ICT News page for me, please?”
E: “Sure Karla, will do and I’ll let you know when you can review it.”
K: “Can you make sure all comments are directed to me?”
E: “Uh…I do not know if that is possible, I will try to find out.”
The other day a reader of my blog asked me how you can send the News comments to the person mentioned as the Author (rather than the person who created the post). I did not have an answer ready, so I decided to find out and report. I love investigating these kinds of things and finding as many workarounds as I can! And yes, I have found a few workarounds.
2. By default, the Creator of the News post = the Author
When you use the defaults, the post will appear with you as the Author. When you post something on someone else’s behalf, it is possible to click on the Author field and insert name or email address of the author. The author’s name will then be displayed on various places as the responsible person for this post. You can simply click on the field below the title and insert the name/email address of the author. BTW, this is called the Author Byline. You can make the Author Byline visible in the Site Pages library (see screenshot with #6)
You can add the Author (when this is someone else than the publisher) by clicking on the highlighted field.
3. Readers can Like and Comment to posts and comments
There’s a simple thumbs-icon for Likes and a field to add comments. Anyone who can read the News post can give feedback.
This setting is enabled by default. If you find it is not, check with your SharePoint or Office365 admin because this is a setting in the SharePoint admin center > Settings >Pages. The Author can decide to turn Comments off, but for News I do not think this is good practice. For Pages it can be a good idea, especially if they are meant for long-term usage.
You can Like or Comment at the bottom of the post, when enabled.
4. You can receive or stop email notifications of Likes and/or Comments
Check your settings on the SharePoint Homepage.
Click the gear wheel top right
Select Email Notifications Settings
Make sure you have the first 3 enabled if you want to be notified.
Please note this setting is for all sites you have access to, so you cannot set this per site.
On the SharePoint home page, you can click gear wheel and then Email notifications settings
The top 3 buttons should be enabled to receive notifications
5. External publishers (Creators or Authors) NEVER get email notifications
I do not think this will be a big deal for most organizations, but in my own tenant, where I am the only user, I always need externals when I want to test things like these. So I need to plan my tests carefully. 😊
6. You can show Likes in the Pages Library
You can make the column Like Count visible in the Pages Library. This can be helpful if you do not want to receive an email every time, but you do want to keep track of Likes. You cannot show Comments in this way, nor is there a list of Comments in the site, as far as I know.
Like count is a column that you can add to a Site Pages library view. To the right you see the name of the Author of the post (Author Byline). In most cases this is me, but some posts have another author.
7. Email notifications only go to the Creator of the post
And this is where the problem is. Although Karla would like to receive a notification of the comments, they will always be sent to me.
How can I make sure that the Author gets notified of comments and likes?
There is no simple straightforward way to set this, but workarounds a. to d. may help:
a. Train people to ALWAYS @ the Author when making a comment
As you do not see who the Creator is (unless you go to the Site Pages library) this will have to become a habit for every post within the organization. This will need education and change management!
These comments will go to the Creator (when mentioned) and also to external Creators and Authors, so this is very dependable. 😊
However, if you are a Creator who has disabled Comments on the SharePoint homepage, you will still get these messages. 😒
@mentioning the Author is workable, but will need change management
b. Use an Outlook Rule to forward Comments to the Author
The Creator must be internal and needs to make sure he or she has comments enabled on their SharePoint Home Page. They can then forward notification mails to the Author.
If they always create News for someone else, or for the same person, they can add a simple Forward rule based on the word “Comment” in the subject.
This Rule will forward all comments and replies to comments to Mystery Guest.
If they only occasionally post News on someone else’s behalf, they will need to be more specific and create a new Outlook Rule for every post, based on the title. 😒
In case the Creator only posts something on someone’s behalf occasionally, they will need to set a Rule for each post, based on the title of the post.
If the Creator does not like to have the comments, they can add an additional rule that these messages are deleted immediately after forwarding.
This also works for external Authors, providing your organization has not blocked external forwarding.
c. Use PowerAutomate
I tried to find a “trigger” for the addition of a Comment or Like, in order to notify the person in Author Byline if this was different from the person in Modified By, but could not find it. Whenever I thought I had a good trigger, I could not select the Site Pages library, so I guess Power Automate does not want me to automate something from here. (Which is strange, as the Power Automate link is visible in the Site Pages library) Does anyone know if this is correct? Or have I just selected the wrong triggers?
Of course you can use Power Automate to forward the email that goes to the Creator, but I find Outlook Rules much easier to use.
d. Add a web part with instructions to move the conversation to Yammer or Teams
You can also disable Comments and divert the discussion to a Yammer or Teams community. The Author can set notifications there and join the discussion. (For external Authors, please make sure you have externally facing communities!)
This will be most useful for updates for important projects that will stay in the organization for some time, as it will allow you to have an ongoing conversation about the project and its outcomes. For a very temporary news post I think it is too much work, unless you have a generic News discussion community.
An example of diverting Comments to an open Yammer community with the relevant Yammer web part to the right.
You can also divert Comments to an open Team site. There is no web part, so I used a button, but if you publish this news in a Teams-connected SharePoint site, people can find the Team easier.
There are also some options that do NOT work or are not advisable:
e. Set Alert for Likes
Likes or Comments do not count as a “Modification of an existing item”. The Modified column shows no change when a Like or Comment is added. So, an Alert does not work for this purpose.
f. Set SharePoint Rule “when column value changes”
Sadly, this type of Rule, available for most types of modern Libraries and Lists, is not available for Site Pages libraries. 😒
For more information on this nice, but rather obscure functionality, read my earlier post: List Alerts Rule.
Rules available on all types of Lists
Rules available on all types of libraries, except the Site Pages libraries
g. Add a web part with instructions and Author’s contact details
You could disable Comments and add the Author’s contact details and ask people to message or email them. (Just clicking on the Author’s name will already bring these details, but you may need to be more specific) Apart from being extra work for the Creator, this will make the comments invisible to the rest of the organization. Comments are meant to start some open discussion in the organization. Moving this discussion to a personal email conversation is not the way to go.
You can try to redirect people to email but that is really not the way to go.
Depending on the situation one of the following workarounds may work:
The best option for now is to train your users to always use the @mentioning in Comments. This will always send a notification to the person in question, external or not. However, this will override disabled notifications for Comments on the SharePoint home page. 😒
If you post for the same person on a regular basis, you can set an Outlook Rule to forward the comment email to the Author.
If the News is part of an important organizational topic or project (and you post on behalf of the Project Manager, for instance) you may want to switch off Comments on the page and direct people to a Yammer or Teams community for any comments and discussion.
Please let me know if you have found other options!
I thought it was time for a few new intranet videos. The below are all from Vimeo, which has turned out to be a better source than YouTube. The only drawback is that you will need an account (free) with Vimeo and log in in order to see some videos. This is a recent measure.
So, create an account, log on and enjoy!
1. New intranet for a global construction/engineering company (teaser)
“A Digital Headquarters to bring employees from all geographies together”. This intranet for a global engineering company (mostly agricultural from the website) is named after the CEO (who is also the name-giver for the company) which is a nice touch. Many employees feature in this teaser. Sadly you can’t see much of the actual intranet, but it is supposed to be social and connecting, and not just functional en efficient. I also get a little irritated these days by all that corporate talk and big intentions, but I am sure that’s just me!
Uploaded January 2022.
2. Updated intranet for an Australian child care organization (demo)
After a rather bombastic musical intro, you see a decent functional SharePoint intranet with all the usual trimmings. The demo takes you through all the menu items. It has a focus on documents and links rather than news. (Nice search options in the central Document library, by the way).
There’s also some community elements.
The site title shows this is a demo site, so I hope that they have had the time to add some images to the link tiles, and to update the icons for the Office applications in the real site 🙂
Uploaded September 2021.
3. Canadian university/college (teaser)
“The more you engage the better it will be”. Quite a cryptic promise, especially because there is no explanation of how that would work.” There is also no preview of the intranet, which is disappointing.
This teaser is one big promise for a new intranet called College Connect, and as you may know, one of the intranets I worked on/for has been called Connect, so I have always been partial to the name. 🙂
Uploaded February 2021.
4. Intranet for a Swedish university (demo)
An interesting SharePoint intranet with a few non-standard items, I think: breadcrumbs on pages, selection of news sources (different than following sites) and My Menu. I like the yellow dots that signify central sites. Technically it is just the site icon, but I like the concept to separate content in subtle ways, while keeping the design consistent.
There’s also some attention for general SharePoint stuff: search, save for later, navigation and the SharePoint mobile app.
Tip: if you think the speaker talks a bit slowly, you can speed up by clicking on the gearwheel at the bottom of the video and adjusting the speed.
5. New intranet for a US online fashion store (teaser)
Nice colourful teaser for this fashion store. It has relevant info and a social component, and even “integration with Slack and workspaces”. I do not think this is a SharePoint intranet 🙂
We have established that creating pages and news in SharePoint is easy and gives excellent results. As our intranet publishers get more experience, they are also asking more questions, such as “where are my page/news images stored?”
In proper SharePoint style: It depends! 🙂 on the original location of the image. Let’s take a look at the various image sources. These are your 8 options when you add an image to a news item or a page. If our admin has NOT enabled the Organization Assets option you will not see “Your organization”.
Your sources for images for news or pages
A copy of the images used (for any page or news post) may be stored in the Site Assets library in your site, in a folder Site Pages. If yes, the page/post will get a new subfolder with the name of the page/post and the images used.
Experiment
To check what happens exactly, I created news items using each available option. I have no Organizational Assets library enabled in my tenant, but I know from work how it behaves.
These are the news items I created, with the name of the image source:
7 news item, each with a different image source
Results
Only Web search and Upload create a new folder.
Web Search and Upload create a new folder
The good thing is, that adding images is very economic; you seldom get copies taking up storage space. I know storage quota is not really a thing anymore in modern SharePoint, but I have spent so many years worrying to keep SP2007 site collections within their 2 GB storage limit, that this topic will always be on my mind. 🙂 The bad thing is that you will not collect your used images in your site, if you plan to re-use them again. Also, if someone decides to remove their image from the internet or their SharePoint site, you may end up with no image. For News this will not be so serious as most news is volatile. For long-term and important pages, it may be worth keeping your images under your own control.
Results
In the overview below I am sharing my opinion on the various options, based on my experiences, together with their storage behaviour. I have added a ⭐ for my favourites. Feel free to disagree, I like learning from others!
Recent
👍 Convenient
👎 You have probably used this recently, so do you really want to use this again?
📂 No new folder, image is stored in its original folder.
Stock Images ⭐
👍 Good variety of images, freely available
👎 They might get over-used
📂 No new folder
⭐ This is the simplest solution if you need an image and do not want to spend too much effort
Web search
👍 All images you can think of
👎 Beware of copyright – finding out can be time-consuming, not finding out can be costly
📂 Creates new folder
Your organization ⭐
👍 Custom images suitable for your organization, no copyright issues (assuming you use your own and bought images)
👎 You need someone to manage these assets. I am lucky as our Communications manager is both a keen and expert photographer AND a tenacious intranet manager, so she really keeps an eye on this collection and is always happy to add new images when you ask.
📂 No new folder
⭐ Easy to use and this allows you to use specific imagery that fits your organization
📂 No new folder, the image stays in your OneDrive.
Site ⭐
👍 Easily available, good if you have custom images for your site, e.g. with specific theme or branding. Best option for long-standing pages as deletion is within your own control.
👎 Might become repetitive if you have used them before. When you are storing images in a separate library, you or fellow publishers need to remember where they are.
📂 No new folder, the images stay in the library where you have stored them.
⭐ Useful when you create content that will be relevant for a long time, and/or when you have custom illustrations.
Upload ⭐
👍 Familiar experience for most users. Best option if you want to use an image from your OneDrive – upload it from your OneDrive client.
👎 Nothing
📂 Will create new folder
⭐ Especially when you start using SharePoint you will probably have to dive into your own collection on your PC quite often. After some time you will probably be using your Site images, see above.
From a Link
👍 Good way to re-use suitable images across the organization
👎 This can only be a link to an image within your organization (OneDrive or SharePoint). You need to know where the image lives and be sure that your intended audience has permission to see it. The owner can remove it, leaving you with no image. Once you have used it, it is quite hard to find the link to the image and the site. I could find it using F12 (developers tool) and search for the name of the site or the image (if you know) but that is not very convenient. Please let me know if you know an easier way!
📂 No new folder
Conclusion
My suggestion would be to use Stock Images, Organizational Assets, Site or Upload; they appear to be most user- and maintenance-friendly for short and long term.
Your experiences/opinion
Did I forget anything, or is there an option you really like or dislike? Please let me know!
Ellen's Digital Workplace 