• What is Employee News functionality?

The Employee News capability, launched with August 2023 release, addresses the need to streamline internal communication and intranet usage. The new, purpose-built Employee News capability 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. This feature offers a purposeful and integrated experience for both employees and communication managers. It minimizes digital sprawl by consolidating news within Employee Center Pro.

• What plugins will be needed to get the latest Employee News functionality?

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* - which has now been replaced with version 29.0.8), and dependent plugins. This capability is backward compatible till San Diego.

• How can we get featured news widget on the Employee Center Pro Homepage? Is it available OOB?

A new featured news page widget is available for the Employee Center homepage to display news articles right on the landing page. As of August 2023 release, admins will have to manually place the news widget on the Employee Center Pro homepage through the page designer.

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.

• Can I publish News articles on Topic pages as well?

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

• Is this a new content type under 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.

• What is the difference between news and rich content?

News and Rich Content are both new content types under ‘Articles and Pages’ format of the Content Library. Rich Content is a new content type that comes with a drag-and-drop editor that is designed to enable non-technical content authors to create their HTML content with pre-defined layouts and components including texts, images, videos, links, and action buttons. This Rich Content can be used to design Dynamic Topic Microsites which can be embedded within Topic Pages. Whereas News content type can use this rich content editor to publish news articles within the News Center.

• What are Content Destinations?

Content Destinations is a new table within Content Publishing, for capturing widget instance location information into a single list allowing a “Content Template” to be pre-built with audiences and destinations which will automate the publishing of news. Content Admin role is required to access this table.

• What are Content Templates?

Content Templates is a new table within Content Publishing, for building out publishing rules which will streamline and automate volume driven news publishing use-cases. These templates can be selected by a content manager reducing dozens and dozens of clicks for publishing news. The templates will consist of widget instance “Content Destinations”, a defined audience as well as pre-set duration for how long the article should be available. There will also be OOTB default templates allowing a content manager to publish a news article and target it to all employees and destinations on the portal within just a few clicks, all the while, still allowing authors to continue to manually target news via CP publish plans as desired. Content Admin role is required to access this table.

• How can I automate publishing process for bulk news articles?

Content authors can automate the publishing process for bulk use cases of news articles through Content Templates. Once content authors pick a Content Template through the design tab 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.

• How would you measure clicks or views of news articles?

Content Authors can analyse 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.

• Are we able to export knowledge articles and import into News Articles?

No, as of now it is not possible to export knowledge articles and import it into News Articles.

• Will the news content be searchable via AI search?

Yes, Employee News are searchable via AI Search on Employee Center Pro. With our August 2023 release, we have added News Articles as search sources for AI Search out-of-box. On the AI Search page, the News Articles show up as ‘News’. When clicked, the News Articles directly open in the detail page view.

• Will the news experience be available in Vancouver EA?

No, it is not, unfortunately you will need to upgrade the plugins via Store separately