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Redirecting SharePoint News Comments to Article Author
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SharePoint Online
Oct 19, 2022 7:55 PM

Redirecting SharePoint News Comments to Article Author

by HubSite 365 about Ellen van Aken

Pro UserSharePoint OnlineLearning Selection

Discover workarounds to redirect SharePoint News comments to the named author. Become a Microsoft expert today!

A Recap of SharePoint Online Comments and Author Navigation

Understanding the complexities of interaction on SharePoint News can sometimes be challenging, especially when it comes to their comments and authors. The essential question is - how will you assign comment notifications to the author instead of the post's creator? Ellen Van Aken took this intriguing challenge and gave a detailed explanation on how to overcome it.

To start with, a crucial fact to bear in mind is that by default, the creator of SharePoint post is considered as the author. However, an explicit author can also be defined through the author field. The author clearly appears in several sections indicating they are responsible for the post. A method of mentioning the author is demonstrated - the Author Byline. An author can be specified by clicking the field under the title and inserting the desired name or email.

Apart from 'liking' posts, readers can engage by adding comments. Any reader with access to the post can give feedback or interact via 'likes' and comments. This culture of interaction is encouraged by default. The author, however, has the power to disable the 'comments' feature. Van Aken expressed that this feature should ideally remain enabled, especially for news posts.

Notifications and Interactions

There was further exploring of the technicalities of notifications. On SharePoint Homepage, the settings allow one to receive or halt email notifications about 'Likes' and 'Comments'. However, these settings apply homogeneously to all the sites a user has access to, thus not allowing individual settings for each site. Meanwhile, external publishers or authors do not receive email notifications.

The 'like count' and 'author byline' can be displayed in the Pages Library. This could be a handy tool for tracking user interaction without being notified for every single like.

However, problems arise when comment notifications are needed. Currently, notifications only go to the post's original creator. So, how can the author be notified of comments and likes?

Workarounds

While there is no straightforward way, Van Aken suggests a few workarounds for this issue. One simply suggests that people are trained to always '@' the author when commenting. This approach needs a systematic change in the organization's practice and habits. However, even with this, if the creator has disallowed comments, they will still receive these messages.

Another workaround involves using Outlook rules to forward comments to the author. The original creator can set up these rules to forward notification emails to the author, ideally if they always publish News for the same user(s).

Power Automate could also be a good option to forward the email going to the creator to the author instead, but according to Ellen, Outlook Rules were more straightforward for her. Moreover, she explored the idea to divert the interaction to a Yammer or Teams community instead of SharePoint's comment section. This implementation requires externally-facing Communities to be enabled.

Unfortunately, a few suggested options did not pull through due to restrictions in SharePoint's functionality. These include setting Alerts for likes or using the SharePoint Rule of 'when column value changes'.

Takeaway

In conclusion, being able to redirect comments to the authored person of a News post is a functionality that might be useful in many scenarios. While the more automatic way to do this does not exist at the moment, the current alternatives include training users to use '@' mentions in Comments, setting up Outlook Rules for forwarding comment emails or diverting discussions to a Yammer or Teams community as an option. These alternatives together stay a dependable choice for managing comments effectively on SharePoint Online.

Read the full article Diverting SharePoint News comments to the Author

SharePoint Online - Redirecting SharePoint News Comments to Article Author

Learn about Diverting SharePoint News comments to the Author

If you're seeking to yield more insights or knowledge regarding the topic of enabling the author of a SharePoint Online post to directly receive comments rather than the post-creator, several approaches can be considered. This blog post gives an in-depth explanation of the diverging process of SharePoint News comments to the author alongside several workaround strategies. It would be essential to study the basics first, then move on to the more advanced aspects of SharePoint Online.

You may want to begin with Microsoft's training courses on SharePoint Online (use SharePoint on the cloud). This will help you grasp a solid understanding of the online version of this technology and how it works.

To broaden your knowledge of SharePoint and its social features (like comments), consider taking Udemy's SharePoint courses. Some courses focus specifically on SharePoint's social capabilities and how to effectively utilize and manage them for improved productivity.

Technical experts who want to delve deeper into the SharePoint social features can benefit from Pluralsight's course on Managing SharePoint Online. The course covers document management, external sharing, security, and compliance.

By acquiring these courses and utilizing the insights stated in the blog post, you'll be able to address any questions or challenges around the topic. In particular, a thorough comprehension of each 'diverting comments to the author' workaround stated in the blog post, will enable you to implement the most feasible process based on your requirements.

  1. To start with, you need to comprehend the basic principles such as the difference between the creator of the post and the person stated as the author. You should also understand how 'Likes' and 'Comments' work, how to enable them and how notifications for each are received.

  2. We then look into workarounds implemented in places where notifications don't go to the author despite enabling them. Approaches to tackle this range from driving behavioural change (training people to always tag the author when making a comment) to setting up Outlook rules to allow the creators to forward comments to the author.

  3. More technical workarounds include using Power Automate or shifting the conversation to Yammer or Teams; here conversations can continue over an extended period making it more useful for long term projects. However, for temporary news posts, this might be too much effort.

  4. The blog also delves into approaches that do not work. These include setting up SharePoint warnings when column value changes or adding a web part with the author's contact details. The latter steers away from the principle of open discussion which is the purpose of comments.

In conclusion, while the ability to allow the author to directly receive comments is a useful feature, there isn't a straightforward way to achieve this. The method you choose to apply will depend highly on the particular situation and the amount of change you're willing to implement.

Please let us know if you would like to gain more insights on the topic or discuss it in more detail.

More links on about Diverting SharePoint News comments to the Author

Diverting SharePoint News comments to the Author
Oct 16, 2022 — The Creator must be internal and needs to make sure he or she has comments enabled on their SharePoint Home Page. They can then forward ...
4 ways to manage comments on SharePoint news and pages
Apr 24, 2022 — Click “Notification settings” at the bottom of every email notification for news and pages. · Click the gear wheel on the SharePoint landing page ...
Diverting SharePoint News comments to the Author
Oct 20, 2022 — Read my earlier post on the topic · By default, the Creator of the News post = the Author · Readers can Like and Comment to posts and comments ...

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