SharePoint Online - News - push notifications

Question

Background: My company has just rolled out SharePoint Online Team/Comm sites. Yammer and MS Teams is not yet available.

The business is starting to use teams/comms sites as a way of communicating news to different audience groups.

Challenge: The SharePoint mobile app delivers push notifications each time a news post is published on a site followed - which works great!

However, there is no desktop/email notification equivalent which means the owner is reliant on the audience to either go to the SharePoint landing page to see all news they're following, or wait for organic site visits.

This results is minimal traffic going to news posts published, unless the news is promoted via other channels (intranet/email).

Requirement

Deliver an instant desktop notification to all employees following a team site/comms site when a new post is published. Ideally this would be delivered through a desktop widget/gadget or browser extension/plugin, which pops up pushing employees to the news post.

Question: 1) Is anyone aware of a tool/method to achieve what is described above? 2) If not, is there another way to tackle this one?

Any thoughts welcome. Thanks

Flow

I've looked into Flow to automatically email a SP list of contacts each time a news post is published.

The cons with this is:

1) It will generate large volumes of emails, which we're trying to move away from. 2) A SP list of contacts would need to be updated/managed.

Peter

Answer 1

SharePoint Online provide webhooks, create some webapi to monitor changes to the news list and then push notification whenever news list get changes. To start with Microsoft have very good documentation

• Overview of SharePoint webhooks
• Get started with SharePoint webhooks
• SharePoint webhooks sample reference implementation

SharePoint list webhooks

Task                        HTTP method
Create a new subscription   POST           /_api/web/lists('list-guid')/subscriptions
Get subscriptions           GET            /_api/web/lists('list-guid')/subscriptions
Delete a subscription       DELETE         /_api/web/lists('list-guid')/subscriptions('id')
Update a subscription       PATCH         /_api/web/lists('list-guid')/subscriptions('id')

Based on above you can create some desktop application installed in each PC or laptop by some AD policy which show notification whenever news is added.

Hope this will helps you.

Answer 2

Start using Teams. Notifications there work both on mobile and desktop.

If you want to continue using SharePoint News, you can use the SharePoint News Connector to get the news into Teams channels (the Teams notification functionality will kick in)