2 ways to organize department news on your SharePoint Hub

One of the primary goals of the Intranet portals is, of course, to share the news and announcements within the organization. SharePoint has some fantastic options available in this area, thanks to the mighty News Web Part. I blogged quite a bit about the News Web Part and various capabilities we have (i.e., the ability to schedule or expire news posts, etc.) Today, though, I want to share some advice on a few ways to organize department news on your SharePoint Hub, especially if you are part of a larger organization.

Use Case

Most small organizations have just one area for news and announcements on the main landing page (Home Site). And most likely, you have just one person managing those announcements. However, if you are part of a larger organization, you probably have different categories of announcements managed and curated by different employees and departments. So the advice below is really for this situation described above.

Option 1: Organize department news via Metadata Categories

The first option would be to utilize multiple News Web Parts on the same site and filter them based on the metadata tags assigned to each news post. The idea is that you will create a Metadata Column called Category or Department on the Site Pages Library on the main Intranet Hub Site and tag each news post against that respective category (i.e., HR News, IT News, General News). Then, on the main landing page itself, you will add several news web parts, one for each category, and then filter the News Web Parts based on the corresponding page property (i.e., Category = HR News). If what I described above sounds a bit complicated, do not worry; I explained how to set this up in great detail in this post.

Tagging a News Post against a predefined category

Filtering the News Web Part for a specific Category (Page Property)

Pros:

• All the news posts reside in one site and one library (Site Pages Library), making it easy to maintain (i.e., add/edit/delete/schedule/expire)
• This option is great if you have different categories of news to publish but have one person to maintain them all

Cons:

• In the case of multiple authors, no way to split security since all news posts reside in one site/library (need to give all authors Edit access to the main Hub Site).

Option 2: Organize department news via separate sites on Hub

The other option to organize and publish the news on an Intranet is to utilize the Hub functionality of SharePoint. The idea is that each area/category of news gets its own site to create news and announcements, and then those news posts are rolled up on a main Home Site/Intranet Site thanks to the Hub news roll-up feature.

Pros:

• Allows each department/category own space to create news posts – separated with own security/permissions. For example, you could create a separate site called “CEO Corner” and have the CEO publish the posts on that site, which will be rolled up and presented in the specific News Web Part on a SharePoint page which will only filter for news posts from that CEO Corner site.

Cons:

• No way to pick and choose the specific news posts to publish from rolled-up sites – it is all or nothing
• In case certain news are to be expired on a Hub site after a certain period of time – the setup would require the use of managed properties (since each and every site will have its own Expiry date column)
• Less control for the overall aggregation of the news posts