MS Communities – Adding/Editing User Group News

Jared Johnson, 17 January 2012

The news feature of a user group is one of the most useful to Group leaders as it is one of the main ways to communicate with the group members.  The group news page can be accessed by clicking the news link on the groups navigation bar, and news headlines plus summaries are posted on the group’s homepage.

To be able to add or edit news you must be an admin of the group you are posting news for, if you are an admin when you navigate to the group news page a link titled “Add/Edit News” will appear on the right hand side of the screen. This will take you to the editing page for news items which will look like this:

The “Add new News” link at the top creates a new news item, the green pencil next to a news item opens it for editing and the red cross deletes the news item. The items can be sorted by Name or date by clicking on the headers of each column , by default it is sorted by date.

Either clicking the Add new News link or the green pencil button will change the page to look like this:

The Back link in the top left hand corner takes you back to the previous view, you can Save or delete the document you are working on with the Save and delete buttons and there is some word processor style buttons to help edit the content of the post.

The content of the post is made up of a number of fields, these are: News Title, Release Date, News Summary, News Text and Publish from and Publish to.

News Title and Release Date are both required, News Title is the name and the title of the news item, Release Date is the date that the news happened on.

News Summary and News Text can both be formatted using the Text controls at the top of the page, News Summary is the text that is displayed on the news items when they are on the groups homepage – it is best to keep this to a few lines of text at most. News Text is the main content of your news item, you can insert text, pictures and even videos into here.

Publish from and Publish to both control the lifetime of your news item, Publish from sets a date and time when the news appears, you could for example prepare an April fool’s day news item the week before to only appear on the site at 12:00 am on April the first. Setting a publish to date and time will cause the news item to disappear from the site when that date is reached. Both of these fields can be left blank if they are not required.

Once you are done editing the news item just click the Save button at the top of the page -  if it is saved successfully a message “The changes were saved.” will appear, if not you did not fill out one of the  fields correctly and will display some red text describing what is wrong.

With this information you can get started on adding news to your group!