Our Challenge
How can we, as corporate communications, ensure that our employees are always well-informed about all relevant topics of our company, which operates throughout Switzerland and is multilingual? How can we highlight particularly important news prominently on the intranet homepage? How can we ensure that newly published news is quickly seen and read? How can we give employees the option to decide which topics they want to be informed about? How can our corporate publishers still publish news easily and quickly despite all these options?
Out-of-the-box SharePoint already offers great possibilities for publishing multilingual news, such as translating content or targeting audiences. However, these options were not sufficient for our needs. Therefore, we decided to create our own solution.
Our Goal
An uncomplicated solution for company-wide news - tailored to the needs of our employees. Our employees can choose for themselves which topics and in which language they want to see news on the intranet homepage. Our corporate publishing team can quickly and easily create news in different languages and decide which news is published in which channels. Important news can be defined by the publishing team as sticky news for a certain period before they are arranged chronologically in the news feed. Additionally, news should only be displayed on the respective homepage per language if they are in the same language.
This way, our employees are informed quickly and easily at all times.
Our Solution
News Channels
Any number of news channels can be maintained multilingually in the term store. They are available for subscription to all users in their preferred language above the news feed.
News can appear in one or more channels. All subscribers to a channel thus see the news in their personal news feed on the intranet homepage.
Publishing News
The news can be edited and published just like any other content page. The channels can be selected in the page properties. Since our channels are translated, our corporate publishers also benefit from selecting the news channel in their language. Using custom start and end date fields for each news item, the news feed can be set even more granularly, and the display duration of a news item in the feed can be limited.
Sticky News
If we want to highlight news visually, the news becomes sticky news. I can limit the display period by entering the sticky start and end date in the page properties. Once a news item reaches the sticky end date, it is arranged chronologically in the news feed.
Real-Time: Infobox for Newly Published News
Often, the intranet homepage is already open for our employees. When new news is published, a notification appears using our solution. When the notification is clicked, the homepage reloads with the new news. This way, our colleagues do not miss any news and are informed in a timely manner.
Conclusion
Our above-average engagement rate for news articles speaks for itself 😊. I am convinced that by allowing each employee to choose their own channels, the information overload is reduced, leaving more time to read the content that is exciting and relevant to each individual. The notification on the homepage when an update is displayed in the news feed also helps employees to not miss any important information. Our publishing team is also happy to be able to publish news quickly and easily 😊. It has been more than worth developing these functionalities, even though the out-of-the-box news functionality already offers a lot.