Speaker 1: Creating a newsletter that you send out to your organization on a regular basis can be stressful, time-consuming, and feel like a never-ending process. Wouldn't it be great if you could ignore all of the work related to the actual generation of the newsletter and focus just on creating really high quality news articles and content and automatically generate the newsletter that would go out to your employee. Today I'm going to talk to you about how to actually do that, including the mindset shift that it takes to change from the big newsletter into individual news articles and the technology required to actually make it happen. Today, if you're creating a newsletter, you probably are creating individual pieces of content or at least tagging them maybe in the early part of the month to say, I want this to be included in the news article. And then as you get closer, maybe you're generating some specific content and you have maybe some other pieces of content that you're kind of gathering or thinking that you might want to have included. And then right up close to the end, you start to try to verify that all of it is good and is good content, format it into the right document, the right format, send it for approvals to management, and and kind of all this pressure to get it done by a specific date, so that it can get out in a newsletter that everyone's expecting on, you know, maybe the third Friday of the month, right? That can be a lot of pressure and is more closely related to, you know, traditional newspaper, right? So news articles that somebody's producing, there's a deadline and you have to meet that deadline to make this happen. In the modern world, especially in internal communication, there's really no need for that. What you really want to be doing is taking that piece of content that got generated on the second day of the month, create a news article, publish it, let people start using and viewing that content, get approval for that right then. And so then what you're doing is number one, you're spreading out the generation of that content and the approval of that content, and turning this into small little bites of content that can happen all the way through the month. And in addition, we're going to talk about in a little bit in a lot of detail, technology can be used to automatically send weekly digest to your end users with content that you created in that week that gives them timely information about these this news event that happened, which really changes the world from maybe somebody doesn't know about this thing until the end of the month, they know within a week, hey, this new thing happened, and I can do something about it, I can feel more part of the organization, and I may be able to take action in my job based on something that I learned about in the news article. So in summary, the main shift is, you have to be okay, generating the content bit by bit. And the fact that everybody isn't going to get the same content at the same time. So it's not like I produce the newsletter and everybody says, Hey, did you see the newsletter? Did you see this latest article, everybody's going to be seeing it all the time all the way through the month, little bit by little bit. So if that's not something you're interested in, you should check out a different video. But if you're down for that, let's dig a little deeper. Automatic News Digest in SharePoint allow you to focus on generating your content, and then automatically send email digest to your users with the news that it thinks is relevant to them. The fact that these news digests are automatic means that you really need to understand how Microsoft is selecting the news articles they're going to be sending to your users. So you can maximize the effectiveness of these tools. So let's go through some basics. News Digest won't show your users anything they don't already have access to. So all the content that gets sent to your users is security trimmed just for them. Second, it's activity aware, meaning that if I've gone and viewed a news article, it's not going to try to send me that same news article again. It's not going to always get that right. Because obviously, if I just looked at the news article, and then I get the email three seconds later, it doesn't it's not that fast. But generally speaking, it's not going to try to show you news articles that you've already read. Lastly, it's focused, meaning you're not going to get a news digest four times a week, just because somebody published a news news article, you're going to get one news digest every week. And it's going to contain about up to 10 news articles. How do I make sure that my users are getting the news that's important to them or that they need to get at the top of that list. So the first way is to talk about news that is organizational news. So Microsoft has the ability to take specific sites and designate them as organizational news sites. Doing that means a lot of things. The most important of which is that it means that the organization has decided that that site should be promoted. News content from that site is more important than other news. So the first thing you need to do is make sure that you've configured sites that you are you think are really important as organizational news sites. A few examples of some common organizational news sites would be an announcement site or news from the executive or news from the president site. These are things that everyone in the organization should see, you know, at the top of their feed and should be really promoted across SharePoint. Now that I've set my my organization news site up, maybe I'm producing 10 or 15 news articles within that site. What if I want to boost or or promote one specific news post above all the rest? To do that, you can actually go into an organizational news site and mark a specific story as a boosted article. And what that's going to do is actually promote that above everything else. So those news articles are going to be promoted above organizational news sites and any other category we talk about. A good use of this would be a scenario where you have maybe five, six news articles a week going on your organizational news site, but you just announced maybe a merger and you want that to be the top news article for all of your employees. That's something you could boost up and have show up above all the rest. The next group of news articles we're going to talk about is news that's related to you. So these would be things like your manager posted a news article or maybe the president of the company posted a news article. Those things will automatically get directed to me because they came from somebody that is related to me. So in order to make that work properly, you really need to make sure that your org chart is configured properly, specifically in Active Directory, all of your employees, managers, and the manager's manager need to be configured properly in order to be able to trigger that type of news. So last type I want to talk about would be frequently visited sites. So these would be sites that you've favorited or that you visit often. And those content from those sites are also going to get promoted above other things. So this would be a scenario, let's say I'm in the engineering department, and you know, there's lots of content being produced from HR and maybe from sales, but I want to see my engineering news above those other news articles. That's what this is going to do for me. In order to make this work properly, you need to make sure to favorite news sites where you want to get news from. So what does this mean for your end users? If you've set up a site and tagged it as an organizational news site, they're going to get that news above other news, they're going to get boosted news above even the organizational news. In addition to that, they're going to see news that's on sites that they favorited. And they're going to see news from people who are in their chain of command, so their manager, or maybe even the CEO of the organization. Hopefully seeing the way this works, you can see how the mindset shift we talked about earlier can be applied to how you create news. If you're looking to create something that you have to make sure that everybody sees, you should be creating an organizational news site or a boosted news article. If you're just trying to let people who are, you know, related to a particular person, make sure they can see the content, just make sure that they're the one that posts it. Doing that will automatically send that to the everyone who that person is related to in their next news digest. So the focus shifts from creating a high quality newsletter to creating individual high quality news articles that will automatically be sent to people who it's important to. So you might be wondering how you get started with this. The answer is, you already started. Microsoft enables these features by default, and your users are already getting these digest emails, assuming that you're creating news in a modern site. What you may be wondering is, how can you turn this off if individual users or maybe your entire tenant doesn't want this feature on? You can disable it at the tenant level for everyone in your organization. But also any user can go to any news digest. And there's a link for notification settings. And by clicking that they can select the option for digest news posts you've missed to turn it on or off. We've worked with a number of organizations that have had a traditional newsletter that went out once a month and have transitioned to this new model. And it's really worked great for them. Employees are seeing news more quickly in a more timely manner. And the administration of that isn't nearly as extensive as it was previously. Even in cases where they do keep a newsletter and have the digest, the newsletter becomes much shorter, more focused, more elaborate, in some cases focused on the really, really important things. Whereas everything else is just left to be part of the news digest that automatically comes to everybody's mailbox. I know it can feel weird to let a system generate this email that you were creating for just for your company in the past. But trust me, all the time you save from the approvals and crossing all the T's and dotting all the I's generating this newsletter, you can actually spend that time doing other things that would really improve your employees experience. We've been producing quite a bit of content recently about news articles, SharePoint communication sites, and just other intranet focused content. And I'm really interested to know if that's content that you guys find interesting. If you like that sort of content, leave a comment down below with some areas that you're struggling with. We'd love to know what you're looking for to produce some more content that would be helpful to you. As always, like, subscribe to our channel and I'll see you in the next video. Transcribed by https://otter.ai