• Overview of Employee News functionality along with November enhancements of this feature
• Live walk-through of Employee News front-end and Authoring Experience ( Demo start 33:35 onwards)

Feature Overview

The purpose-built Employee News capability, launched with August 2023 release, provides a seamless, end-to-end experience with a dedicated News Center page, widgets for various Employee Center pages, effortless news authoring using the Rich Content Editor, and targeted publishing.

With Employee News, an Employee Center Pro functionality, content authors can easily author news using an intuitive drag-and-drop rich content editor and utilize the automated publishing flow for easy publishing of volume-driven news use cases.

Below are the key components of the captivating front-end Employee News experience launched with the August 2023 release:

• News Center – News Center is a dedicated page to highlight news articles available for the user. It includes a carousel-styled featured news section on top, followed by the news feed widget at the bottom, and the video or events widget on the right. Admins can configure the news center page layout as per their organizational needs through the page designer. Articles can be individually targeted for each of these widgets (as described in the new authoring experience section below)

Upon upgrade, the News Center page is automatically included in the Mega Menu on Employee Center Pro. At least one news article must be published on the News Center for it to appear on the Mega Menu.

• News on Employee Center Pro homepage and Topic pages – A new featured news page widget is available for the Employee Center homepage to display news articles right on the landing page. (Note: in the current experience, admins will have to manually place the news widget on the Employee Center Pro homepage).

The taxonomy topic pages include a new Related News widget that displays news items tagged to that topic, offering a targeted news experience.

Portal admins can configure both these widgets, using instance options, to display the desired number of articles, and define whether to display the subtitle or thumbnail image.

• News Article detail view page – Each news item, displayed in any of the news feed widgets, leads directly to the detailed news article page view. This page includes the main body of the article, which can be a combination of text, images, videos, etc. and easily created using the Rich Content Editor (as explained in the new authoring section below). It also includes an 'Other News' widget to engage users with important news articles.

Below are key components of the seamless Employee News authoring and publishing flow, launched in August 2023:

• "News Article” content type in Content Library- Content authors can effortlessly create and publish news articles using the new content type called ‘News Article’ in the existing Content Library. Since news is part of Content Library, all the authoring and publishing capabilities available with Content Library, such as governance, translations, and scheduling, are also applicable to News.

Note: Currently News Articles can only be published on the portal and cannot be published as part of a Campaign. Support for publishing News on Now Mobile and via Campaigns will be part of our upcoming releases.

• News authoring experience using Rich Content Editor – For authoring News Articles, content authors need to define the 1) article heading, 2) sub-heading (optional), 3) thumbnail image (optional), and 4) article body. Similar to Topic Microsites, Rich Content Editor is used to design the body of news articles, providing a familiar and seamless authoring experience for content authors.

• One-click News Publishing experience – Once the News Article is ready, content authors can publish it with one click on their desired, multiple ‘Content Destinations’ with one click using ‘Content Templates’. Content Template is essentially a pre-defined publishing plan that includes Audience, Content Destinations i.e. the page and widget instance where the article must be published, and duration for which the article is published.

Once content authors pick a Content Template for the new article, the publishing plans are automatically generated as defined by the Content Template. The content authors can choose to add to the pre-defined plan or edit it before publishing the article.

The addition of Content Templates has significantly reduced the number of clicks/steps content authors need to go through to publish News articles in multiple locations simultaneously. No more tedious repetition - it's quick, easy, and efficient!

There are two Content Templates - Featured News and News Default - available out-of-the-box with August 2023 release. Content authors should create additional Content Templates as per their requirements. Refer to Content Templates in product documentation to learn more about it.

• News Analytics – Organizations can analyze the success of their news articles by enabling ‘Track Analytics’ for the News Headline widget on the News Article page. The occurrence/Article Views metric for all the news articles is tracked in the User Experience Analytics dashboard under the ‘Content Publishing – News Articles’ event.

Employee News functionality requires Employee Center Pro license and can be activated by upgrading Employee Center Pro (28.2.1), Content Publishing (version 29.0.7), and dependent plugins. This capability is backward compatible till San Diego.

For other feature deep-dives, refer to other topics covered as part of Employee Center Academy series.

FAQ's

Refer to Employee News experience FAQ's here.