Microsoft SharePoint has unveiled a new feature that enables businesses to transform their news posts into emails. This development aims to enhance communication by allowing companies to directly engage their audience through their email inboxes.
Microsoft SharePoint, traditionally used by businesses to update customers via websites, now offers a feature for SharePoint News that lets companies turn news posts into emails. These emails can serve various purposes, including newsletters, alerts, and more.
“Made for Email” Template
In the official announcement on Microsoft's Tech Community site, the company detailed the process of using this new feature. Content creators can select a “Made for email” template when crafting their SharePoint News articles. Once the article is complete, it can be dispatched as an email. The announcement emphasized, “Sending a page as an email will not change existing site permissions, and sending a page as an email will not give your recipients access to the original page if they don't already have it.” Drawing an analogy, it further explained, “You can think of sending mail by email as making someone a photocopy of a page in a book. They can read that page, but nothing else in the book.”
Rollout and Availability
This feature is currently being introduced to SharePoint Targeted Release customers and is expected to be accessible to all SharePoint users by the end of September. An intriguing aspect of this feature is the inclusion of email views in the view counts for SharePoint news stories. This means that the number of times an article is viewed in its email version will be added to the overall view count.
Microsoft encourages feedback on this new feature and has provided resources, including a video demonstration and templates, to assist users in navigating this update.
In May, SharePoint became a part of Microsoft's Copilot AI expansion. Integrated with OneDrive Copilot, you can use natural language commands to create new documents, add content from other sources, summarize or rewrite sections, and collaborate with others. For example, you can say “create a new project proposal based on the data from this spreadsheet” and Copilot will generate a draft for you. You can also say “add a summary of the latest market research report to this document” and Copilot will bring in relevant information from your SharePoint or OneDrive files.
