Various customers have shown there is an increased desire to share news within the existing digital Workspace. It must be possible to specify news according to target groups, to ensure only relevant news is shown. Besides this, there is a desire to offer flexible formatting for a news article.

There are alternatives, such as SharePoint, but these are outside the confines of the central digital Workspace. This causes an additional threshold for end users, and as a result news is barely read, if at all. Employees both miss information, and don’t feel involved with the company. We have received this signal from various customers.

To provide our customers with an easy, user-friendly way of sharing news with the company, we created Announcements as part of The Hub.

Announcements are part of the Hub. With announcements, you can share information to groups of employees. Announcements are divided into categories to quickly distinguish between the different types of communication. It could be about the opening of a new office location, a promotion or retirement of a colleague, IT related news about the digital adaptive workplace, or anything else you would like to share.

As most customers have either a large group of mobile workers or a hybrid workforce, it is crucial to create and maintain social interaction between colleagues. This helps to strengthen your company culture and increases the retention of employees. That is why we added a few functions to announcements that allow organizations to create social interaction in their digital workplace.

Employees can respond to announcements by specifying a comment, mention ('@') or reaction type (such as a 'like', a 'love', etc.). And employees can keep track of (“Follow”) fun or important announcements receiving notifications in their Activity Feed when those announcements have been updated.

Each Announcement will also display a view count, showing how many unique users have viewed the announcement. You can also check which users have viewed the announcement.

A workspace administrator can assign permissions to one person, a department or more groups, or everyone.

For example, you want the group department Communication to be allowed to create new categories and announcements.

This is set in Workspace management settings - 'Group management'- choose the group - edit - permissions. The permission is 'Create and manage all announcements, categories and groups' - 'Allow'.

You can also give everyone rights for this in Default permissions, but we do not recommend to do this.

If you want to limit the level of permissions, you can make only the Communication Manager, or the whole department, a 'Category editor' or 'Category owner' who is then allowed to edit information within a specific category.

Some companies choose to make everyone a category editor, for example, within a 'Marketplace' category in which employees can share ads, maintaining social interaction. But you can think of setting up Communities in this case!

Be cautious about who you allow to create announcements, because giving too many people control might lead to a notification overload.

For a more detailed explanation about permissions, please read About the Hub.

You’ll notice that the process of creating a new announcement is very user-friendly with an intuitive design that simplifies the creation process. If you have sufficient permissions, easily follow the steps to create an announcement.

When creating the content of your announcement, a title is required. Then you use basic elements for the cover image. Click on the plus icon to add an image, video, or embed code and lines. You can also choose a 'Grid' to define the amount of columns, a big left or right column, and so on.

Here you'll find all information about creating Announcements.

All about editing, elements and grid you will find here.

When you create a new announcement, you will be prompted to select a template. By default, you start a 'Blank announcement'.

You can click 'New template' to create a new template. Selecting a template will show a preview on the right side of the window.

Templates can be managed from the Manage Hub items screen. From here, you can manage your templates: create new ones, or edit, duplicate, rename or delete existing templates. Users can be granted permissions to manage templates.

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If you inadvertently close the announcement, it will automatically be saved as a draft. Or if you find yourself unable to complete your announcement or wish to have it reviewed before publishing, ensure you save it as a draft. Both the category and title are mandatory for announcements to be successfully saved as drafts.

Drafts can be edited from the Manage the Hub page to be published, planned or deleted.

Announcements can be updated very easily: go to the announcement and click on the pencil icon in the upper right corner, this brings you to the composer of the message.

You can do more with existing announcement from the Manage the Hub page, accessible via the Manage button in The Hub. Select the announcement to tick the box and choose an action:

Only planned or published announcements can be edited and updated.

You can filter announcements in Manage the Hub by these types of status:

The Hub live tile offers different layouts and default views. You can choose to add the live tile more than once to Workspace. We mention some general best practices for the Hub live tile in the article: About the Hub.

When the Hub live tile is added to your Workspace, and you're in 'Edit mode', you can right-click the app or use the three dots to edit the desired app settings.

Be aware users can still choose another category in their live tile to be shown, although the default is always set back to the settings the admin made by refreshing the page. As a user, simply click on the header of the live tile:

See also our overall Hub-article for general best practices and choose the optimal settings.

We often see three types of categories:

With these category types you can, for example, separate personnel news from the organization news.

Note: It is possible to post an announcement in multiple categories at the same time (for example one category for multiple locations).

If an announcement is a 'Must-read', use the pop-up function. This way, you ensure that people will not miss the announcement, for example to announce scheduled network maintenance at the office. But be aware of the fact that publishing direct pop-ups may have a large impact on the user experience.

If an announcement is a 'Nice-to-read', do not use the pop-up function. From the Hub tile, everyone has a clear overview of all announcements. From there, they can read and react to announcements. Think of social interactions between colleagues, such as childbirth, anniversary of 10 years of service, etc.

Pin the most important announcements, so they appear at the top of the category page. Up to 5 pinned announcements will be displayed at the top, but you can click on 'Show all pinned announcements' to view them all.

Up to 5 announcements can be pinned per category.

In the live tile, the two most recent pinned items will be shown.

Add tags to your announcements. Tags help to identify what announcements are about, so users can find the right information faster.

It is possible to highlight an important announcement. You can choose one item to be visible within the Hub tile, which is perfect for ensuring important updates reach the right people.

Click 'Lay-out' - 'Spotlight' and then select the announcement you want to put in the spotlight.