With SharePoint news, you can bring your organization’s news stories to life with rich formatting, images, and dynamic content. SharePoint news allows you to break free from plain text and create engaging news experiences that keep your organization and teams up to date. No matter if your content lives in Microsoft 365 or outside, you can easily add it to your news post.
Whether you are creating an announcement, status update, or people news, your news posts will look great on any device and bring your stories to your users, even inside Microsoft Teams. SharePoint news includes simple methods to distribute and promote your news, including automatic news distribution and promotion to specific audiences. Readers can interact with news they care about by liking, commenting, and re-sharing it.
In this article
What kind of content should I use SharePoint news for?
What is an organization news site?
How are news recommendations for users determined?
How do I get SharePoint news to the right audience at the right time?
Do all of these features work for Office 365 GCC High and DoD?
Where is news shown?
To give users an easy way to stay connected with your organization, news is distributed through a number of channels such as in the personalized feed on the SharePoint start page, the mobile app, SharePoint sites, Teams channels and more. Here are ways news is distributed:
Note: The Viva Connections mobile app will be available later in 2021.
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SharePoint start page – Automatically displayed based on relevance to user
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Team sites, and Communication sites when the news web part is used or the Highlighted content web part is used and filtered to news
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Hub sites, when the news web part is used
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Viva Connections for Teams Desktop, when a news web part is used on the home site
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Email – SharePoint will automatically send a news digest of news users might have missed, and you can also manually curate a news digest to send in email
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In Viva Connections mobile app (available later in 2021)
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Displayed in the mobile app Feed based on relevance to user
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In the Viva Connections Dashboard (available later in 2021) when you add one or more cards for news (manually curated).
Notes: The following news features are not supported or limited in Office 365 GCC High and DoD:
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News on SharePoint start page
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Sources for news in the news web part (limited to the site where the news web part is used)
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Automatic news digest
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Viva Connections Feed
What is an organization news site?
You can specify SharePoint sites as "official" or "authoritative" for news in your organization by creating them on an organization news sites. These posts get special visual treatment (see the "NEWS @ CONTOSO" color block below) and appear on the SharePoint start page.
SharePoint admins can specify any number of organization news sites. For multi-geo tenants, organization news sites would have to be set up for each geo location. Each geo location could use the same central organization news site, and/or have its own unique site that shows organization news specific to that region. Learn more about how to set up an organization news site.
Using a home site as an organization site
It is likely that any news you post on your home site is valuable for the entire organization. So when you designate a site as your SharePoint home site, it is automatically set up as an organization news site with no additional work needed by you.
How are news recommendations for users determined?
Relevant news articles are shown to users based on:
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News sites users frequently visit or follow.
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Suggested sites based on your people network
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News authored by people user interacts with
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User interactions with sites, documents, files and lists
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Most recent news
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Boosted news
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Organization site news
Do all of these features work for Office 365 GCC High and DoD?
The following features are not yet supported in GCC High and DoD:
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News on the SharePoint Start page (coming soon)
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App bar (coming soon)
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Sources for news in the news web part except for "This site" (more coming soon)
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Auto news digest
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News in the Viva Connections feed
Where can I learn how to do all of this?
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Create and share news on your SharePoint sites - Office Support (microsoft.com)
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Use the News web part on a SharePoint page - Office Support (microsoft.com)
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Automatically sending news post digests with branding - SharePoint (microsoft.com)
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Create and send a news digest - Office Support (microsoft.com)
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Create an organization news site - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Docs
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Boost news from organization news sites - Office Support (microsoft.com)