Publishing news within a SharePoint site is quite straightforward. SharePoint Online, as a news publication tool, can more than meet the vast majority of communication requirements and is a fantastic way to keep people in your company up to date on what's happening or upcoming within your department or business area (formal or informal).

What does require a bit of thought and planning is how you actually want to manage the publication of news within your site.

Knowing in advance WHAT should be published and WHEN is key to keeping the internal comms engine running smoothly within SharePoint sites!

😢 What typically happens with news on most SharePoint intranet sites...

You launch your shiny new Intranet Communication site.

It's beautiful. You keep pictures of it in your wallet and talk to all your friends about it. The site homepage is magnificent and has a news web part front and centre. Fantastic! 😍

The stage is set, and you're ready to sing! Everyone on the team is full of enthusiasm. News post ideas are flowing, and you wonder when you will ever find the time to post them all.

But then… as time goes by… the post ideas become a little bit more sporadic. Eventually, they stop altogether, and the task of publishing news gets delegated to some unfortunate soul who sees it as the bane of their existence.

Then…

👉 This will probably happen:

The unfortunate sole loses interest and only creates a news post or news link when it is absolutely necessary. These posts become more and more unimaginative and about as engaging as a trip to the dentist. They become single-column, single-paragraph news posts, or worse... they simply become documents embedded within the post via a file viewer web part (which is less than ideal from a user experience perspective).

👉 Followed by this:

The concept of news on your site is abandoned altogether, and that beautiful site homepage becomes a snapshot in time with a stagnant news feed that only communicates to site visitors that this site is wildly outdated and rarely updated.

A scenario that is a real shame and all too common. 😭

Why does this happen to most SharePoint Intranet sites that publish news posts?

Good question. Most often, it is down to one of two reasons...

REASON ONE: You overestimated your requirement to publish news on your site.

If this is the case, don't be too hard on yourself. It happens to the best of us. It's one of those times where 'it is what it is'. The most important thing is to recognise it and take action.

The first thing you should do is remove the news web part from its position of prominence on your site homepage. In fact, I would suggest removing it altogether from the page. If you leave it there, all you are doing is drawing attention to the fact that you rarely update your site. Users (also known as regular people!) expect news to be timely, and if the latest news post is about the Christmas party from 12 months ago, it's not a good look.

Instead, when you have news to publish, go ahead and publish it.

Add the news web part back to your Homepage when you have something to say and remove it when that something is no longer relevant. The modern experience in SharePoint Online makes adding and removing web parts easy and user-friendly, so it's not a big deal.

REASON TWO: You are not managing news as "a process" you can visualise and track, and as a result, it's always a scramble when it comes time to publish something.

​​​​​​​I'm going to state the obvious here and say that news on your site won't just happen by itself.

If you want to generate consistent and quality content (and why wouldn't you?!🤔), you need to plan for it.

Coming up with new news post ideas and then creating them takes time. The person or people responsible for them need to be afforded the time to do it right. Otherwise, everything is last minute and must be fit in around any other planned activity, which leads to stress and a general sense of "just throw up any old thing".

The rest of this blog post is all about creating a process to manage news publishing on your intranet site.

🏁 Implementing a process or general approach for managing the publication of news on your Intranet site (this is the SharePoint Tutorial part!)

You need to work towards knowing what news you'll want to be publishing 2-3 weeks out from today.

This will allow you enough breathing space to plan news posts well ahead of time, create engaging news posts that would make the New York Times envious and ultimately.... publish them when you need to, all whilst maintaining a zen state of mind!

I know what you're thinking, this sounds like it might be hard work and will dominate your time, but in reality, it tends to be much more straightforward.

Let's take an example

Meet Dan 👋

Dan works within the HR Team in his company and is responsible for maintaining the HR site on the company Intranet.

Dan isn't particularly organised. In fact, he often wonders why anyone would put him in charge of anything (he doesn't tell his boss this).

However, it's January, and Dan's New Year's resolution is to be the best Intranet News Publisher the world has ever seen ⭐️.

So, he decides that he is not going to be reactive when it comes to publishing news on the HR site. He is going to be proactive and disciplined in his approach.

Dan quickly realises that if he doesn't put a process and structure in place to help him organise news publishing, he's going to be in trouble.

Dan decides to do the following...

• STEP 1 He's going to create a place where he can capture new news post ideas and track them.
• STEP 2 He will make a conscious effort to produce top-quality, engaging news posts.

Let's look into each step in a bit more detail, shall we?

Note: This blog post has grown legs as I've been writing it, so I am going to split it into a two-parter. Step 1 above is included in this one, and step 2 will be covered in separate post.

🤓 STEP 1: He's going to create a SharePoint Site List where he can capture news post ideas and track them.

This is a fantastic idea. Nice one Dan!

Creating a place where you can actually see your process at work is huge. There are loads of ways to do this within Microsoft 365. Dan has chosen to utilise a SharePoint Online List in this case, but a Planner board could serve a similar purpose.

But let's focus on the SharePoint list option for now. Here's what Dan does...

He starts by opening up a SharePoint site that the rest of the HR Team also has access to (not the HR Intranet site that the whole company has access to, he uses the SharePoint Team site that comes with the MS Team he uses with the HR Team).

Note: If you are following along, the idea here is that you want to use a SharePoint site that only your team has access to as this is 'back office' stuff we are doing here. You could use the HR Intranet site, but you would want to restrict access to the list so that the whole company doesn't have access. A Communication site or a Team site is fine. Both will work the same for our purposes.

He opens up Site Contents and selects 'New', and then 'List'.

Fig. 1 Create a new SharePoint list

He is then presented with a range of templates to choose from and spots that there is a list template called 'Content Scheduler'... that sounds like a nice fit, so he chooses that.

Fig. 2 Select the 'Content Scheduler' list template

Note: This list template comes with a workflow built in that essentially will send you a reminder based on a specified 'Publish By' or 'Draft Due By' date. You will be asked whether or not you want to include it. For our purposes, we won't. Dan will be on top of this and doesn't require these automated reminders.

Dan now has a SharePoint list where he can catalogue all news posts ideas as Items within the list. He can now manage them within a process via 'Statuses' and 'Publish By' dates assigned to each list Item.

Let's look at the list structure and how Dan tailors it to better meet his news management process.

Below are the columns that the list comes with and the modifications Dan will make so that the Content Scheduler list fits his process better;

*✅ 'Content Title' Column:

This will be the title of each list Item. Each list item will represent an individual News Post. Pretty standard stuff, so no changes are required here.

✅ 'Description' Column:

A pretty standard 'Multiple lines of text' type column. Dan will use this to provide a bit more context to the list Items.

✅ 'Author' Column:

This is a 'Person or Group' type column and will allow Dan to specify who the expected author/owner of each list Item will be. It will typically be himself (let's be honest), but he'll keep it just in case he needs to assign a list Item to somebody else.

✅ 'Status' Column:

This is a 'Choice' type column and will allow Dan to track what stage each list Item is at in the process. This is going to be one of the most important columns in the list. Dan will customise it to meet the lifecycle of news within his process. He wants to be able to tag each new list Item with one of the following statuses:

• Idea (Default) - List Items which have the status of 'Idea' are simply that. They are something that could be published, but there is no commitment to do so. All new list Items will have this status by default.
• In Draft - List Items which have the status of 'In Draft' have been committed and are intended to be published. They have been created on the HR Intranet site as a draft news post (careful you don't prematurely publish by mistake!).
• Ready to Publish - List Items which have a status of 'Ready to Publish' have had all the final touches added and are only waiting on that 'Publish' button to be clicked when the time is right.
• Published - News posts which have a status of 'Published' have gone live. Job done!

👉 Here's how he does it:

1. Open up the list and click the drop-down beside the 'Status' column heading

2. Select 'Column Settings' and then 'Edit'

3. An 'Edit Column' menu will be displayed on the right-hand side of the screen.

4. Under the 'Choices' section, update the list of available choices to match the statuses outlined above

5. In the 'Default value' dropdown box, select 'Idea'

6. Click 'Save', and you're done!

Fig. 3 Edit the 'Status' column

❌ 'Draft Due By' Column:

This is a 'Date and Time' type column and is included in the list template to allow you to specify an expected draft date. Dan doesn't really see a need for this. He will track dates by the 'Publish By' date, so he deletes this column. One less field to fill in is always welcome 😎

👉 Here's how he does it:

1. Open up the list and click the drop-down beside the 'Draft Due By' column heading

2. Select 'Column Settings' and then 'Edit'

3. An 'Edit Column' menu will be displayed on the right-hand side of the screen.

4. At the bottom of this menu, click the 'Delete Button'

5. You will be asked to confirm that you want to delete the column. Don't let the warning scare you, go ahead and click 'Delete' and you're done!

Fig. 4 Delete the 'Draft Due By' column

✅ 'Publish By' Column:

This is another 'Date and Time' column and will allow Dan to specify the date he is targeting to publish his news posts. Dan is a visual person, so he decides that he wants to customise the formatting of this column so that:

• If the 'Publish by' date is in the future, it will appear green - All good
• If the 'Publish by' date is today, it will appear orange - Get to work
• If the 'Publish by' date is in the past, it will appear red - This ship has sailed

This will allow Dan to have an 'at a glance' view and see what's what.

👉 Here's how he does it:

1. Open up the list and click the drop-down beside the 'Publish By' column heading

2. Select 'Column Settings' and then 'Format this column'

3. An 'Edit Column' menu will be displayed on the right-hand side of the screen. Click 'Edit Styles' in the 'Format Dates' panel

4. The formatting is pretty much set up already, so we just need to edit the colours for each of the conditions mentioned above

5. Click 'Save', and you're done!

Fig. 5 Format the 'Published By' column

✅ 'Content Type' Column:

This is another 'Choice' type column which allows for list Items to be categorised by a type, e.g. 'Help Article, 'Blog Post', 'Video', 'Social Media Post' etc. Although Dan is going to initially be using this list exclusively to manage HR News posts, he may want to expand the scope further down the road, so he decides to customise this column so that it only includes one option to start off with i.e. 'HR News Post' which will be set as the default. That way, if he wants to add additional types, he can simply update the choices as and when needed.

👉 Here's how he does it:

1. Open up the list and click the drop-down beside the 'Content Type' column heading

2. Select 'Column Settings' and then 'Edit'

3. An 'Edit Column' menu will be displayed on the right-hand side of the screen.

4. Under the 'Choices' section, remove all but one of the choices by clicking the 'X' beside each and rename the remaining choice to 'HR News Post'

5. In the 'Default value' dropdown box, select 'HR News Post'

6. Click 'Save', and you're done!

Fig. 6 Update column choices

✅ 'Published Link' Column:

This is a 'Hyperlink' type column which allows for a link to be stored against the list Item. Dan will keep this column and use it to link directly to the News Potst he creates on the HR Intranet site. This will be great for quickly navigating to news posts and for future reference if Dan wants to create a new news post from an existing one. No changes required, this one is good to go 💪.

❌ 'Content Image' Column:

This is an 'Image' type column and allows for an image to be saved against the list item. Dan doesn't really have a need for this column as images will be managed from within the HR Intranet site. He decides to delete this column. (go back to the 'Draft Due By' column section above to see how to delete columns).

❌ 'Content Files' Column:

This is actually the default 'Attachments' list column which comes with every SharePoint Online list. It has just been renamed to 'Content Files'. The purpose of this column is to allow you to upload any files that may be relevant to your list Item. However, files within SharePoint Online sites should be managed within Document Libraries as opposed to attaching them to list items. Therefore, Dan will not be using this column within the list and would like to hide it from view. We will address this point in the next section so for now, you're all good!

We're 95% of the way there with structuring this list. The last thing Dan wants to do is to check what 'List Views' have come with this list and see what changes might be required.

He clicks the 'All Items' dropdown on the right-hand side of the screen and see's that there are 4 views already configured for this list as part of the template:

• All Items
• Grouped by Content Status
• Published Content
• Un Published Content

Dan wants to create one more view to really help him see what the plan is and that view will be a calendar-based view. Essentially, it will be all list Items displayed within a calendar based on the 'Publish By' date.

Let's take a closer look at each and see what changes Dan will make

✅ 'All Items' List View

This is the default view for the list and essentially shows everything in the list without any grouping or filtering applied. Always a good idea to keep this one here as a baseline.

Dan does however want to make a few tweaks to this view such as:

• Hide the 'Content Files' column as he won't be using it
• Expand the width of the 'Description' column so that the text does not wrap as much and it's easier to read.

👉 Here's how he does it:

1. Hover your mouse just to the left of the 'Author' column until you see a double-sided arrow cursor. When you see it, click and drag to the right. This will expand the width of the Description column.

2. Clicks the drop-down arrow next to any of the column headings (it doesn't matter which one).

3. Select 'Column Settings' and then 'Show/Hide Columns'

4. An 'Edit view columns' menu will be displayed on the right-hand side of the screen

5. Uncheck the 'Content files' checkbox

6. Clicks apply. The 'Content files' column should now be hidden

7. Click the drop-down arrow next to the 'All Items' view and then click 'Save view as'

8. Click 'Save' (don't change the name) and you're done!

Fig. 7 Edit the list View

✅ 'Grouped by Content Status' List View:

This view groups all items in the list by the applied Status. This is great for having a high-level view of where everything is within the process and then allowing you to quickly focus on a specific status and see all articles tagged with that status.

Dan does however want to make a few tweaks to the view, such as:

• Expand the width of the 'Description' column so that the text does not wrap as much and it's easier to read.
• Set the default behaviour of the groups to be collapsed rather than expanded so it is easier to select the grouping he wants to focus on.

👉 Here's how he does it:

1. Hover your mouse just to the left of the 'Author' column until you see a double-sided arrow cursor. When you see it, click and drag to the right. This will expand the width of the Description column.
2. Make sure you have selected the 'Grouped by content status' view and click the drop-down beside it
3. Select 'Edit current view'
4. On the next screen, scroll down to the 'Group By' section and select the 'Collapsed' radio button
5. Scroll back up to the top of the page and click 'Ok', and you're done!

Fig. 8 Edit Current View

The 'Grouped by content status' view will now show all groupings collapsed, making it much easier to navigate. Sweet!

Fig. 9 Grouped view

✅ 'Published Content' List View:

This is a simple enough view and is designed to provide you with a list of the list items which have been published. All that is going on here is it is the same view as the 'All Items' view except that the Status column has been filtered so that only list items tagged as 'Published' are displayed. We don't need to make any changes to this view. It's fine as it is. Perfect 👍

✅ 'Unpublished Content' List View:

This view is the opposite of the 'Published Content' view, i.e. it is filtered to show all articles with a status other than 'Published'. There is, however, an issue that Dan will need to resolve though. The current filter applied is looking for the original statuses that came with the list, but Dan changed these to suit his process, so he needs to make a change to reflect his new statuses. Essentially, he will need to configure the filter so that it will show all items where the status is not equal to published. That will do nicely!

👉 Here's how he does it:

1. Make sure you have selected the 'Unpublished Content' view and click the drop-down beside it
2. Select 'Edit current view'
3. On the next screen, scroll down to the 'Filter' section and update the filters as shown in the image below. Essentially you are removing the existing filters and applying a single new filter to all list items where the status is not equal to Published
4. Scroll back up to the top of the page and click 'Ok', and you're done!

Fig. 10 Filter a list View

✅ 'Calendar' List View:

This view will let Dan see all news post ideas displayed within a calendar. This view brings the plan to life and makes the whole thing real! We can all relate to a calendar when dealing with dates much easier than a flat list 🧐

👉 Here's how he does it:

1. Click the view drop-down and then select 'Create new view'
2. Give your view a name (Dan names his 'Calendar View')
3. Select 'Calendar'
4. Choose whether you want the calendar to display by week or by month (Dan chooses by month)
5. You can leave all other options as they are, so just click 'Create', and you're done!

Fig. 11 Create a calendar list View

Now Dan has a calendar where he can clearly see when he has planned to publish each news post. Excellent!

Fig. 12 Calendar View

🥳 And that's it!

Dan (and you too if you have been following!) has created a simply spectacular SharePoint List where he can track his news articles from initial idea all the way to published news post.

He can clearly see where each news post idea is in the process and when he is targeting to publish it, and is one step closer to fulfilling his New Year's resolution! 🎉

In my next post, I'll cover step 2 and share my thoughts (and a juicy tutorial) on creating and structuring news posts within SharePoint that doubles down on user experience. All based on super scientific research and experience!

Chat Soon, Dan