Microsoft Teams – SharePoint News connector

Today I noticed the following update in the Message Center of my Office 365 tenant.

When clicking through to the Additional information you will see how to add SharePoint News Articles in Microsoft Teams.

You simply go to the channel where you want to add the news:

Then you select the SharePoint News connector:

And after a few more clicks you will find the news articles appear in Teams:

Not too exciting, it is just another connector again. But if you think about this a bit longer then you will find the whole new approach that Microsoft Teams is adding to your internal systems (intranet!)

Where recently, I’ve had the feeling that each team is a separate something. Also, each modern SharePoint site seems to be a bit of a standalone site. Things don’t always connect up nicely resulting in the user experience moving a bit too much towards a technical solution rather than a user solution. I always like to put my user experience first and that isn’t always easy.

With these kind of connectors (there should still be more following) I do get the feeling that things are improving as data can be shared between the different applications. So in this example the authors of the news can create their news articles in SharePoint while the users don’t need to leave Microsoft Teams. Maybe a next step could even be to create the news articles in Microsoft Teams.

Pieter Veenstra

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com