For many organisations, internal communications are a patchwork of emails, Teams messages, and often static intranet pages. There’s a better way.
If you lead a team or a business, you’ll recognise the problem. One department sends an email that half the organisation ignores. A project milestone gets shared in a Teams channel that only a handful of people follow. Your comms team is either overwhelmed trying to pull everything together, or intranet pages sit untouched for weeks at a time.
SharePoint News is designed to help with exactly this. And if your organisation is already using Microsoft 365, there’s a good chance you have access to it right now.
In this video, our COO and Co-Founder Darren Hemming shows you how SharePoint News works in medium and large organisations – especially where different departments or teams are responsible for sharing their own updates.
How SharePoint News works
In SharePoint, news is created on sites that usually represent departments, projects or specific areas of responsibility.
Each team publishes its own news because they’re best placed to explain what’s happening in their area.
Your finance team knows what finance needs to communicate; your project leads know what their stakeholders need to hear. All that local knowledge stays where it belongs.
What makes this work at scale is something called the SharePoint News web part.
When you add it to a page, you can choose where the news comes from, not just from one site, but from all your department or project sites at once. This means you can create a central communications hub that automatically brings together updates from across the organisation.
Nobody needs to copy and paste anything or chase people for content. Everything is pulled together on its own.
Easy communication across your whole organisation
Imagine your organisation has sites for each department, a few project teams, and some whole-business areas like HR and IT. Each week, a handful of those teams publish a news story – a policy update, a project win, a reminder about an upcoming deadline.
Rather than those updates sitting in separate places that most people never visit, your central hub automatically brings them all together.
Leaders get visibility across the organisation without having to chase people.
Employees get relevant information without having to know where to look for it.
And the teams publishing the news stay in control of their own updates.
How to customise how SharePoint News looks
One thing worth noting is that SharePoint News includes different layout options for how your stories appear on screen.
Some layouts are clean and practical and well-suited to regular operational updates.
Others are more visual and designed to draw attention – better for announcements you really want people to notice.
Being able to match how something looks to how important it is helps people quickly understand what needs their attention. And that means they’re more likely to actually read it.
News can be created by the departments and teams who know it best, and then brought together centrally without anyone losing ownership of their content. Views help organise and archive news over time. And different layouts help signal what matters most.
Used well, SharePoint News becomes a shared communication layer across your organisation; clear, structured, and easy to scale. It’s one of the most practical steps you can take to improve how information moves across your organisation.
Make SharePoint simple with Cloud Design Box
SharePoint News is a powerful feature, but getting the most from it depends on having the right structure in place underneath it. That’s where Cloud Design Box comes in.
Cloud Design Box specialises in building SharePoint and Microsoft Teams intranets, helping organisations create a connected, branded digital workspace that brings communication, collaboration, and document management together in one place.
From setting up the right site architecture to training your teams and providing ongoing support, we take care of the platform so you can focus on what matters.
Over 800 organisations already trust Cloud Design Box to help them get more from Microsoft 365.
If you’d like to see how a well-structured SharePoint intranet could work for your organisation, get in touch to start the conversation.
