User interface of the Corporate News module
These types of news are characterized by being thoroughly prepared, by representing communication from few to many, and by a fixed, aesthetic layout.
The module includes refined content publication functionality that allow content creators to easily broadcast engaging corporate messages.
News are built in SharePoint pages and can be managed through approval flows and scheduled publishing. The use of SharePoint pages for news articles enables use of stimulating rich media such as images and video and allow content creators to include all SharePoint and LiveTiles Intranet Enterprise web parts.
The Corporate News module include tools to display related content and contact person.
Editors can choose to highlight corporate news in picture sliders to grab staff attention. Also, social features as like and comment can be enabled to engage staff in your company’s corporate news.
Anatomy of the Corporate News module
When you set up Corporate News on your intranet, you initiate by creating a site collection for news publishing with the corporate news site design. From this site, editors can create news articles from SharePoint pages.
You can create multiple corporate news site collections on your intranet. E.g. if you want separate news sites for different offices or departments.
To highlight corporate news, you use the Corporate News web part. E.g. you can place the corporate news web part on a front page to bring attention to newly published news.
The news archive is created as a page under the Corporate News site collection as part of the Corporate News site creation process. This page will display all news created on the Corporate News site and enable users to find specific news from the site by search.
Creating a Corporate News article
Creating a corporate news you’ll be creating a page to present the news.
To create a modern news page perform the following steps:
1) Go to the site where you want the news to be located.
2) From here, click + New, and then ‘News post’ to create a page for your news.
The name you chose for the page will be reflected in the title of the news page.
NOTE: News on a modern SharePoint site does not reside on a news site, like news on a classic SharePoint site does.
Corporate News web part settings
To highlight corporate news in a slider or with engaging media e.g. on a front page, you utilize the ‘Corporate News’ web part.
The web part includes three pre-made templates that each offer different look, feel, and functionality for the web part. Of course, you can develop own customized templates as well.
To insert the Corporate News web part on a modern page, perform the following steps:
1) With the page in edit mode, click the plus icon to see the list of web parts available.
2) Find the ‘Corporate News’ web part either by navigation or by searching the list.
Once placed on a page, you can configure the Corporate News web part to display the desired news in the desired way.
Configure the Corporate News web part by clicking the pencil icon on the left of the web part.
In the settings panel, you can configure basic settings.
The settings panel of the Corporate News panel has three pages.
The Corporate News we part, has the following settings:
Under Design, you configure the styling of the web part frame and title.
Title lets you write a custom title for the web part.
In Chrome type, you define whether you want to hide or make visible the title and frame of the web part.
If the chrome type is visual, you can choose whether to display the web part title.
Image lets you upload an image as the background of the web part frame.
Text color lets you define the color of the title text as background lets you define the background color of the web part’s title field.
With the option of setting a fixed height for web parts, you can ensure alignment of web parts on pages with two or three columns. If the content exceeds the fixed height of the web part, users are offered to expand the content. Dynamic height will make web part heights adjust to content.
Under Properties, you configure web part settings.
Template lets you select a template for the web part. Choose between the three pre-made templates defined for the Corporate News module or your own custom made templates.
In the URL fields you define which news pages the web part will display.
If you want the web part to display news pages that reside on a modern site, enter the URL of the site in the Modern News URL.
If you want the web part to display news pages that reside on a classic site, enter the URL of the site in the Classic News URL.
If you want the web part to display pages from several specific news sites, these news sites have to be located under the same site. You will then enter the first part of the URL that these news sites share. E.g. if you want the web part to display pages from two news sites that are both subsites to a site called ‘Country Office London’, the URL you enter to make the web part display these two sites will be https://your-intranet-url/sites/country-office-london/. The web part will then display news pages from all news sites that are subsites to the Country Office London site.
If you want the web part to only display news pages from one news site, you enter the absolute URL of the particular news site, e.g.: https://intranet-url/sites/news-site-url.
NB: If you choose the query mode ‘Search’, you can leave the URL field empty to let the web part search in the whole Enterprise application and display news from the whole application.
News Type offer you to filter corporate news items based on the criteria ‘Top News’, ‘Not Top News’, or ‘All News’. Selecting ‘Top News’, only news marked as ‘Top News’ will be shown by the web part, choosing ‘Not Top News’ only news NOT marked as ‘Top News’ are displayed, and, self-explanatory, selecting ‘All News’ will make the web part display all news from the news site(s) the web part collects news from.
Number of news lets you select how many news the web part will display.
Number of columns lets you select between one or two columns for the templates ‘Slider’ and the ‘Image left’.
Under Query mode, you define how the web part will find the news to display.
Choosing Search, the web part will search for news that meet the criteria you have set up in the web part. Because it relies on search, it requires SharePoint to have crawled news items before they are shown. On the other hand, this query mode will make the news load faster in the web part, once crawled. Also, this query mode can search among news in the whole tenant.
Selecting CAML, the web part will find the news that meet the criteria you have set up by using SharePoint’s Collaborative Application Markup Language (CALM). This approach will make sure that new news are shown right after they have been published. However, this query mode will make the new news load a little slower in the web part. Also, using CAML, you can only display news from one site in the web part. If you want the web part to display news from several news sites, you need to use Search instead.
Tick Include Modern News if you want the web part to show modern news pages.
The Result Source is only used when using search query mode. You can create a result source and with that ID the search can be focused on this scope of the result set. If you don’t set a value, the field will take the default SharePoint value.
Caching Type can be used with search query mode.
Selecting PerUser the result of the search will be cached individually for each user. This option is suitable for personalized queries that display different content for different users.
Selecting PerGroup will enable the result of the search to be cached by the system and shared amongst all users of a group. It’s a way to get great page load performance of search driven pages. Enterprise uses the ‘Everyone except external users’ group for the group cache. Group cache should only be used in scenarios where the web part displays the same content to all users.
If Ascending is ticked, most recently modified news will be displayed first (if Order by has the value LastModifiedTime).
Rotation speed lets you time the frequency of a slider’s rotation. It is measured in milliseconds, 10,000 milliseconds is 10 seconds. The function is only in effect when you choose a template with slider function.
In Order by you define the sorting of the news in the web part, and, thereby, which news will be displayed first. Default is last modified. This means the news that was modified most recently is displayed first or last – depending on whether you choose Descending or Ascending.
The text in this fields needs to be spelled out precisely as SharePoint lists them in managed properties.
Language filter allows you to filter news based on one or more languages and only show news tagged with a certain language.
Location filter allows you to filter news based on location and only show news tagged with a certain location.
Department filter allows you to filter news based on department and only show news tagged with a certain department.
If Use user profile property IS NOT ticked, you will filter Corporate News based on terms, and all users will see the same selection of news in the web part (unless, of course, your permission settings prevent this).
E.g. if you apply the term ‘English’ in the Language filter field of a Corporate News web part, this will make the web part only display news that are tagged with the term ‘English’.
If Use user profile property is ticked, you will instead filter Corporate News based on terms associated with user profile properties. This means that the web part will only display news to users with the selected property/properties in their user profile.
E.g. if you select the user property ‘Department’ as department filter, the web part will only display news that are tagged with the term ‘Marketing’ to users who have the term ‘Marketing’ as user property under ‘Department’ in their SharePoint user profile.
Corporate News module settings
Configuring templates for the Corporate News module
Templates for the Corporate News module
One column
By choosing the One column template the corporate news will be displayed as a list with one section. The connected image is shown next to the news title.
Two columns
The template named Two columns consists of two columns presenting news titles and images.
Fullwidth
By choosing the Fullwidth template your news will show one at a time, during a specified time interval, before moving on to the next news image. Choose between 3-10 seconds per image.
Card
The Card template presents the corporate news with the image at the top and the text below.
Rotator
The Rotator template displays news with an image to the left of the title and text. The user has the option to navigate forward and backward between news articles by using the arrows in the left part of the slider.
Timeline
The Timeline template highlights news with animated banner images in a fullwidth design with news titles at the bottom. Users can swipe between news in the slider by clicking on the news titles or wait for the next title to be shown.
Configuring the Timeline template
This template comes with more features than the previous layouts which is set up while editing the web part:
- Corporate news marked as top news (which is changed under Page Details when creating a post), will, per default, have a tag on the featured image. You can change the text of the tag or disable the tag entirely by unticking the box ‘Include Breaking Tag’.
- By activating ‘Showing timeline’ a boarder of news titles will appear at the bottom of the visual.
- The ‘Color content box’ can be enabled and a colored box will be displayed as a background to the news title.
- Choose the number of seconds between slides and decide on the speed each news title will be displayed.
- Click show ‘Gradient or Text Shadows’ and your images will be nicely coated with an elegant shade of overlay, improving the readability.
- By activating ‘Use fixed height’, you can choose the size of your images that appear in the timeline.
- Enable a pause button to give users the opportunity to pause the image sliders if they prefer it dynamic.
Common Challenge: Why doesn’t my Corporate News pages appear
A common challenge for editors and admins managing corporate news is that it can take a long time – sometimes even days – before a newly created news page is displayed in the corporate news web part and at the news site’s landing page.
This is due to the fact that the corporate news web part and the content of the news landing page rely on SharePoint’s search. This means that corporate news pages need to be crawled and indexed by SharePoint before they are able to appear in the web part and on the landing page.
There is a couple of things that can help you in this process:
1) Making sure that the pages you create does not have a friendly URL can make SharePoint crawl and index the pages faster and the pages appear in the web part sooner.
Note that URLs for pages depend on a setting you perform at web site level, and that this is a setting that you have to apply BEFORE you create the handbook page. The URL settings will be applied to all pages you create AFTER you have set it and will not affect pages created before.
2) A good way to check whether or not your page is indexed by SharePoint yet, is by searching for it in SharePoint’s general search center. If the page appears as a search result here, it is already indexed by SharePoint and the reason it does not appear in the web part is NOT because it is not indexed by SharePoint. Hence, it must be due to another issue.
3) Know that your page can be displayed in the page’s left menu and still not in the web part. The left menu does NOT rely on search and, therefore, is able to display the link to the page immediately, contrary to the web parts.
4) Selecting a CAML Query Based query mode for the corporate news web part will make sure that new news are shown in the web part right after they have been published. However, this query mode will make the new news load a little slower in the web part. Also, using CAML query, you can only display news from one site in the web part.
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