Hello, my name is Patrick Kelleher.
I'm a product manager at Microsoft.
And today I'm going to talk to you about news
and show you all the new features we've been working on
that'll help you communicate effectively at your company.
Today, I'm going to talk to you about news distribution.
This is taking news and having it meet your employees
or your users, wherever they are, be it Outlook,
Microsoft Teams, Yammer, or SharePoint, even office.com.
Taking news that's important
and being able to promote it across different surfaces.
For news that's very important,
being able to take it and boost it to amplify it
and stop this piece of news being buried.
And finally understanding news.
Getting your message out to employees is important.
Understanding how your employees engage with your content
is equally critical.
News Page Analytics help you understand,
consumption and engagement with your news content.
You can generate metrics for reach and engagement
like dwell time and see the number of viewers
who have read content.
First, let's look at Office.com.
I've signed in here using Megan's AAD account.
By using Megan's organizational account,
this means that she'll be automatically
logged into corporate websites.
Here Megan can see the items that are recommended for her.
If I go across, I can see that Megan has news articles
that are now showing up.
Megan can click any of these items,
which will take her directly to the news item.
News is of course, available on SharePoint Home.
News shows up front and center on SharePoint start pages.
This is a way that you can show off news in your company
in a very beautiful manner.
And you might have noticed on the left hand side,
we have a new app bar, and of course,
you'll be able to see the news icon on the app bar
on the left hand side.
Clicking into this shows the latest news.
Clicking on any of these news items
will take you straight to that item.
Finally, we're going to look at something that's a daily habit
for most users.
Opening up Outlook is something I generally do
first thing in the morning.
You can already send manual email digests
to the users in your company.
We've heard from employees that keeping up with
so much news information can be challenging.
So to make things easier,
we've come up with a new feature called Auto News Digest.
This will send a summary of key news to users
of news they have not read yet.
One thing that's really nice about this
is that it only shows news articles that Megan
has not yet read here.
So here we can see some stats about the news items,
why they're recommended for Megan
and Megan can click on these to open them directly.
This email gets sent out once a week
and it only shows new items that Megan has not already read.
So if a news item shows up inside of this email,
it means that Megan hasn't read it yet.
This is because we don't want to overwhelm users
with redundant news that they've already seen.
One other thing you'll notice about this email
is that it's branded with Contoso Electronics.
We've listened to your feedback
that branding is really important.
So it's not going to look like
this email comes from SharePoint.
It's going to be branded with your company's logo
and colors that you use
directly from your SharePoint start page.
So you'll maintain control and branding of the email.
And now for the first time,
SharePoint News shows up right inside
of my favorite browser, Microsoft Edge.
News shows up beautifully.
You can easily get your message out
to all users at your company.
And users can feel confident that they're up to date
with the latest news at your company.
While Auto News Digest is a great way of getting news
out to users in your company,
for messages that they hadn't seen,
if you want to explicitly send news items to users,
here's some new ways that you can do that.
So I'm here logged in as Megan on the Contoso news site.
There's a really important piece of news
that I want to share out with my team.
There's a really important update that I want to send out
to my team, the Singapore building update.
I'm going to open up the news item.
Now that I have the news post, I want to send it to my team,
but instead of you sending email,
my team tends to use Yammer a lot.
This is a great way as well to stoke up social engagement
on news posts.
I'm going to select share to Yammer.
From here, you'll see that there's a beautiful preview
of the news post.
I want to share out a message.
Instead of a message, I think I want to take advantage
of some of Yammer's capabilities.
I can ask a question.
I can select praise or I can do a poll.
Here I want to ask my team,
what are they most looking forward to
in the Singapore building update?
The rooftop garden is going to be super cool.
There's going to be bikes available to bring across campus.
And of course, meeting rooms are going to have
Teams integration built right in.
So I'm going to select my community.
I want to send this to the entire company.
Now I can see my news post show up right there
inside of Yammer, complete with a poll.
Of course, I'm really looking forward to meeting rooms
with Teams integration.
Who doesn't love being able to just walk into
a conference room and have your meeting there,
ready to rock.
As communicators, you've told us that not all announcements
and news are equal.
Sometimes you need to boost critical information
to the top of employee's feed.
To address this, we've created a new feature
for news called boost.
News boost works on organizational sites
and you can use it to boost any news posts.
You can take a news post and you can elevate it
to the top of a feed and set specific criteria,
that's personalized on a per user basis.
Let's take this news post.
Miriam Graham has recently joined
as Contoso's chief marketing officer.
Let's jump on in to find out about Miriam.
Here we can find out all about Miriam.
When I look at the page,
I'm a little bit discouraged to see
that it only has 10 views.
I want to make sure that everybody in the company
learns about Miriam Graham by coming to this news post.
So what I'm going to do is I want to take advantage
of this new feature and I'm going to boost this news post.
To boost the news post, I click boost.
Once I've turned boost on,
I see the options for the boost duration.
This configures how long users will see this
inside of their feed.
For the first option,
this means that it'll show up for all users
until they read the news post.
For the next option, a specified number of news impressions,
you can select how many times do you want this show up
at the top or show up prominently in a user's feed.
This configurable from one all the way up to 20 impressions.
And finally, if it's a time sensitive announcement
or if it's time contextual,
so a good example here might be like a virtual five K race
or some piece of news,
which is only relevant for a short time period.
You can select for a specified timeframe.
So given that Miriam is new,
I expect that everybody's going to know about Miriam
within the next two weeks.
So I'm going to select to boost this item
until the middle of October.
Underneath here, you'll also see the ranking of the item.
I can rank it relative to other items that are boost,
because this is so important, I want to move
Miriam's news posts all the way to the top.
By doing this, this means that it'll take precedence
over other boosted items.
Once I have boosted my item,
it'll show up prominently in anywhere news is shown.
The first surface that we've enabled
is the Auto News Digest.
Let's jump into Megan's email and take a look.
Here we are in Megan's Outlook account.
And if we open up the news digest,
we'll see the news that Megan has yet to catch up on.
Up the very top, you'll see that
there's a boosted news story.
This is a story that Megan has not yet read,
and because it's boosted,
it shows up at the top of Megan's newsfeed.
You might be wondering why Miriam's article isn't up there.
That's because Megan has already read it.
Only content that has not yet been read
shows up in the Auto News Digest.
And likewise, if Megan has already seen a piece of content
that has been boosted,
then it'll be no longer boosted for her.
Now let's jump on over to Edge and see what that looks like,
when signed in as Megan.
Here we are, signed into Edge on Megan's account.
And if we scroll down, we'll see SharePoint news show up.
This is a great way for Megan to see what's top of mind
in your organization.
And also you notice that the top two news articles here
have been boosted.
This way, content curators can feel confident
that any boosted news shows up at the top of newsfeeds.
And Megan knows that when she sees news,
that she's going to be well informed of what's going on
at the company.
As a content creator,
I really want to know how my content is performing.
When I create news posts,
I want to understand how well they're doing.
What's the reach of them.
Are people liking?
Are they engaging with them?
Are they putting comments on them?
It's really important for me to know that my message
is heard everywhere and that when I create a news post,
that users actually can one, discover it,
two, read through it,
and then finally engage with it and provide feedback.
You might've already seen some of the file card analytics
that you can access through site pages,
but now we're bringing some insights
right to the page themselves.
So today I'm proud to announce
that we have page analytics on SharePoint.
But 60% of content creators don't measure their content
or how it's performing.
Don't be in that bucket.
Know how your contents is doing
so you'd be confident to know that yes,
it actually is making a difference.
So now that we've looked at some of the site analytics,
you're probably wondering how can I understand
how pages are performing?
How individual news posts are doing?
What's their readership?
How many people are they reaching?
Over 60% of communicators don't measure
how their content is performing.
Don't be in that bucket.
Today I'm proud to announce page analytics for SharePoint.
You can take any SharePoint page or news post
and find out exactly how it's performing.
Here we can see how the SharePoint homepage is performing.
We have page viewers, page visits,
dwell time and page traffic by time.
So let's take a look at these.
So for page viewers, this is the number of unique visitors
to your page.
We can see here in the last week,
there have been nine viewers of this page
and the lifetime number of viewers is 10.
Page visits, is the number of time this page has been loaded
by your users.
The lifetime value here is 891 visits to the page.
Next we have dwell time.
That is the amount of time that users are spending
on the page.
Here we can see that users are spending a lot of time
on this page, an hour and a half per user.
And finally, we have page traffic by time.
This shows what time of the day users are landing
on this page.
And we can look over time and see patterns emerging
and what times users are landing on the page
and consuming information.
This really helps us determine when users are landing
on the page and when we should schedule news posts
to be published.
This feature will be available before the end of the year.
And we're also adding additional charts
to bring it up to the same standards
as what we have on site usage today.
So there'll be platform usage and the ability to export data
for all page analytics.
So that's a great first look at page analytics.
Now beyond page analytics,
we're also going to create a page analytics digest.
So if you create a piece of content,
a SharePoint page or a news post,
a week after you publish it,
we're going to send you an analytics digest,
which highlights how your content is performing
and also providing you with nudges
for things you can do such as share it, promote it
or boost or if it's content on an organizational news site,
to extend the reach of the content.
Now, one thing we haven't talked about
is about the length of the content itself.
When you're creating a post, how long should it be?
And what's the optimum amount of time?
Well, we can't tell you exactly how long the post should be,
but what we can do is tell you how long will it take people
to read that news post.
And not only can we do it afterwards,
we can do it in real time while you're typing it out,
check this out.
Here, Megan is writing a news post on behalf of Patty,
the president of the company.
We can see that this article is nearly 10 minutes to read.
And if we paste in additional text,
we can actually see this being updated in real time.
Now 10 minutes is quite a long read
for a weekly status update.
So let's take out the section down below
and see how it impacts the article.
This is much better.
Megan now is confident that Patty's news post
will be read wholly.
We hope this feature will be useful for you
so you can understand how long it'll take a piece of content
to be read.
This concludes my presentation for today.
All of the features that I showed will be available
by the end of 2020.
The places where boost shows up, will be completed
by next year at the Microsoft 365 Conference.
So let's look at a quick summary
of what we talked about today.
So just to quickly recap, we talked about news distribution.
Having news show up everywhere.
It's going to be on, it's on Office.com.
On office.com, on Edge,
but to make it easier for your users to see news
they haven't seen before, using the Auto News Digest.
Next up for news that's super important,
we're going to give you new abilities to promote it.
Next, we're going to give you new ways to share news,
so beyond email.
So it's going to show up inside of Yammer and Teams,
Next, when you want to boost news,
we want to make sure that you get, that there's ways of
amplifying super-important news,
for news that you don't want to be buried below the feed.
You want to say, Hey, this is super important.
It's going to be personalized on a per user basis.
That'll be showing up and it'll be showing up first
on the Auto News Digest and on Edge,
on the new tab page on Edge.
And throughout the year, throughout the coming months,
we want have it boost show up on more surfaces.
And finally, we talked a lot about news analytics
and understanding your news reach.
So that's the time to read,
understanding how long it's going to take someone
to actually consume a news post.
It's also page analytics.
So understanding, Hey, how are pages performing
beyond what's there already today to the file card.
And finally, the Analytics Digest where will be sent,
where you'll receive a digest on your news post,
and you can see how it's performing,
along with helpful hints on action you can take
to make it show up in other, in more places.
Thank you very much for listening to my talk today.
And if you have any questions or suggestions
of what we should work on next,
please don't hesitate to reach out and ask, thank you.