Atlas News - Create an Email Newsletter

To create a "Newsletter" email from Atlas you'll make use of the Microsoft News web part which includes functionality to create a Newsletter. This is available for all versions of Atlas using Modern SharePoint.

When following this guide please also open Microsoft's documentation of their feature, which we will refer to during this article: Create and send a news digest (microsoft.com)

In this article:

• Ensure your News pages are "posted" as Microsoft News
• Create a page and add the Microsoft "News" web part
• Use the News web part to create a Newsletter

Ensure your News pages are "posted" as Microsoft News

We'll start off this article by explaining how to ensure your News pages are recognised as News by the Microsoft web part we'll be using. Unfortunately while Atlas recognises your News pages automatically from their metadata, Microsoft's web parts do not, so you'll need to "post" the articles you want to include in Newsletters after you publish them in Atlas.

1. Navigate to a News page you want to include in the Newsletter
2. In the top right next to the Edit button, check if you can see the text "Posted":
   
3. If you see this note then you don't need to take any further action for this article.
4. If you don't see it, you'll need to "post" your article. To do this, click on the "Promote" icon in the bar just above your page content:
   
5. Then from the panel that appears on the right click Post as News on this site:
   
6. Once this is done you will be able to select this article in the Newsletter creation tool!
7. If a specific page is already posted as News, when you click promote you'll see that the "Post as News" option is greyed out and instead shows:
   

Create a page and add the Microsoft "News" web part

The Newsletter functionality is accessed via the Microsoft "News" web part so the first step is to create a page and add the necessary web part.

1. Create a new Knowledge Page from Add It. You can follow the guidance here if you need to know how: Add a Knowledge Page (Atlas 2.X+)
2. Now on your page, add a web part and choose specifically the News web part:
   
   The other web parts listed here do not have the Newsletter functionality.
3. If you have news in the current site, you should now see some news items displayed. If not, you should edit the News web part and configure the News Source:
   
   As we noted at the top of this article, you should consult the Microsoft documentation to configure your News Source and ensure it will bring in all the articles you want to use in the Newsletter.
   
   
4. Once you are showing some news you will see a See all link in the top right of the web part - when you see that you are ready to start creating your Newsletter:
   
5. Sometimes the See all link will be greyed out while editing the page. If this happens please ensure you Save or Publish the page to make the link clickable.

Use the News web part to create a Newsletter

After configuring your News web part and ensuring it brings in the articles you want to include in your Newsletter, you can start creating the actual Newsletter.

1. Click the See all link in the top right of the News web part to go to a list of all the news from your source
2. At the top of the list click Email a news digest. This will add checkboxes to the list which allow you to select the articles to include in your Newsletter:
   
3. Go ahead and select the articles you want to include:
   
4. When you have picked all the articles you want, click Next in the bottom right:
   
5. Now you can set up the actual email to be sent, however the options are limited to the Title (1), Recipients (2) and a small Message (3):
   
6. If you're happy with this you could send it directly to the intended audience by clicking Send news digest (4), however we recommend sending the email from here just to yourself, as you can then make changes to it in Outlook before sending it out to a wider audience, for example removing the "Microsoft" branding from the email.
   
   Here is the email by default - note the Subject line, iconography and branding elements that you may prefer to change before sending as an official communication:
   
   
   To change this, you can simply forward the email in Outlook to start editing and remove and replace the elements you don't want before sending it out with a more appropriate subject line, likely forwarding it to an official internal email account that users will recognise who can then send the final Newsletter to users.
   
   
7. Here is an example where I have quickly removed the Microsoft and SharePoint branding, changed the logo to a branded one, shortened article descriptions and changed the subject line, ready to send to the Communications team to send on: