{"id":2829,"date":"2020-06-12T15:13:16","date_gmt":"2020-06-12T13:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/?p=2829"},"modified":"2020-09-30T09:38:33","modified_gmt":"2020-09-30T07:38:33","slug":"sharepoint-auto-digest-email","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/sharepoint-auto-digest-email\/","title":{"rendered":"SharePoint Auto Digest Email &#8211; update September 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Recently Microsoft announced a new feature: <em>SharePoint Auto Digest Email<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SharePoint Auto-News Digest sends automated email to users covering the latest News posts that they have not yet read. It is default turned <strong>on<\/strong>\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a lot of fuss about this new feature, because it can possible generate a lot of unwanted emails in an organization, noise for users and therefor additional load for the support organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">From a business perpective<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>For one of my clients it will be quite annoying: we&#8217;ve set up a portal, with news, which is globally available. The news items presented there are targeted for specific countries and languages. Everybody has permissions to access all news posts, but they won&#8217;t see all of them in their portal: Dutch news won&#8217;t show up for people speaking Chinese for example. These people <em>are about to receive<\/em> a weekly news digest with news in all kinds of languages and all kinds of topics <em>that do not apply to them<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-color\" style=\"color:#ff1111\"><strong>STOP<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the moment of writing there is no mention of a tenant wide control option to turn this off for everybody as it&#8217;s turned <strong>on<\/strong> by default.<br>Turning this feature <strong>off <\/strong>is a per user setting, which <em>only the user itself can manage<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What is really going on<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>There are a few caveats:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Only published news posts are sent in the digest<\/li><li>Users won&#8217;t see news that they don&#8217;t have permissions to see<\/li><li>The email contains news that users have not yet read based on sites <strong>they are following<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Emails are sent from SharePoint Online, no-reply@sharepointonline.com. <s>Office 365 Message Center, o365mc@microsoft.com, as administrator emails come from<\/s>.<br>It&#8217;s a <em>weekly<\/em> email. I can imagine these emails will be sent in batches, so it can be a different day for users.<br>If users want to opt-out of receiving the Auto-News Digest, they can click the <em>unsubscribe <\/em>button at the bottom of the email. If they want <em>to subscribe again then<\/em>\u2026 &lt;how?><br><em>No branding or theming<\/em> of your portal is used in the email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Do external\/guest users get these emails?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Emails are sent based on news of sites users are following. So when a guest user doesn&#8217;t have a OneDrive license, followed sites can&#8217;t be stored there and users don&#8217;t see the follow this site option on a particular site, so the auto-news digest email won&#8217;t be sent either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Is there nothing we can do to stop sending these auto-news digest emails?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, we can stop users from following certain sites. When users don&#8217;t follow the sites containing the primary news they won&#8217;t receive the auto-news digest emails about news items of these sites. At my clients&#8217; case this seems a viable solution to prevent the scenario described in the first section of this post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A script was created which checks if a users follows a specific news site. If this is the case the site will be <strong>unfollowed <\/strong>by deleting the item from the list this is stored in, the Social list, in the users&#8217; OneDrive site.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-syntaxhighlighter-code \"><pre class=\"brush: powershell; title: ; notranslate\" title=\"\">\n$newsUrl = &quot;https:\/\/a specific news site&quot; \n\nConnect-PnPOnline $tenantUrl -Credentials ITIdeaDev\n\n$personalSites = Get-PnPTenantSite -IncludeOneDriveSites -Filter  &quot;Url -like '-my.sharepoint.com\/personal\/'&quot;\n$personalSites | ForEach-Object {\n    $id = $null\n    $followed = $false\n    Connect-PnPOnline $_.Url -Credentials ITIdeaDev\n    $sites = (Get-PnPListItem -List Social -Fields &quot;Title&quot;, &quot;ID&quot;, &quot;Url&quot;, &quot;FileDirRef&quot;).FieldValues\n    $sites |% {  \n        if($_.FileDirRef -like &quot;*FollowedSites&quot;){\n            if($_.Url -eq $newsUrl){\n                Write-Host &quot;News site followed&quot; $_.Url \n                $followed = $true\n                $id = $_.ID\n            }\n        }   \n    }\n\n    if($followed){\n        Remove-PnPListItem -List Social -Identity $id -Force \n    }\n}\n<\/pre><\/div>\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Summary<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The idea of sending users the news they missed is a noble idea, but it lacks any type of control. The only thing which can be done is make users unfollow sites where news is stored, but ofcourse you&#8217;re not fully in control of that either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Please consider up-voting this uservoice: <a href=\"https:\/\/office365.uservoice.com\/forums\/273493-office-365-admin\/suggestions\/40623631-admin-controls-required-for-new-feature-sharepoin\">https:\/\/office365.uservoice.com\/forums\/273493-office-365-admin\/suggestions\/40623631-admin-controls-required-for-new-feature-sharepoin<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"has-text-color wp-block-heading\" style=\"color:#f90004\">Update September 2020<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Admin controls are now available whereby Tenants can opt out via the Power Shell command:<br>Set-SPOTenant -EnableAutoNewsDigest $true | $false.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently Microsoft announced a new feature: SharePoint Auto Digest Email SharePoint Auto-News Digest sends automated email to users covering the latest News posts that they have not yet read. It is default turned on\u2026 There is a lot of fuss &#8230; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/sharepoint-auto-digest-email\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,22,41],"tags":[37,43,46],"class_list":["post-2829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-office-365","category-powershell","category-sharepoint","tag-office365","tag-powershell","tag-sharepoint"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2829"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2839,"href":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions\/2839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itidea.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}