I'm creating a template that will be used by for multiple sharepoint sites and was wondering if there is any way that site users can receive email notifications for new news updates so that they don't have to constantly check the site. This has to be turned on out of by default in the "template" so that each site owner who uses the template doesn't have to set it up manually. If this isn't possible are there any alternatives? I've looked into the announcements list with flow but it doesn't seem like they support each other either. Thanks :)
1 Answer
This is going to be something tricky: News items are stored in the pages library. On one hand, you could create an alert in the pages library, though this has the drawback of that users will get alerts for new pages even if those pages are not "news". Also, alerts aren't included in site templates, so this would have to be configured for each new site. (Though, this is incredibly easy to configure, so I'd recommend checking out alerts if you're not familiar with this option.)
Speaking of site templates, perhaps you're referring to something else, but the term "site template" refers to a specific feature in sharepoint that is not supported for modern sites. There are new mechanisms, such as "site designs", but those don't support alerts either.
Flow is a nice idea, and Flow certainly supports announcement lists, but flow needs to have the SharePoint site and list hard-coded into the flow. So a new flow would have to be configured for each new site.
Perhaps check out the PNP PowerShell commands. You could create a list of sites that you want to monitor for news, and the powershell script could loop through them, find any articles from that day and send an email to the members of a group on that site. Simply schedule the powershell to run nightly, and it will do the rest. This would require you to add any site to that list of sites.
