Publishing and Approving News Articles

You have the ability to enable and set up approvals when it comes to News articles, however this wouldn't be set up initially so may not apply to all customers.

SharePoint provides a mechanism of versioning and editing which allows content authors to work with pages in draft format.  When a page is in "draft" it will be seen as a "minor" version and in order for it to become a "major" version, the page needs to be published.

This should be the standard for all news areas, however in addition to that - we can enable approvals on your news posts that adds an additional step meaning that once your post has been "published", it will also need to be "approved" in order for everyone to see it. 

Note: Only major versions of news articles are visible by everyone

The first process of "Publishing" a news article is carried out by the content authors while the second process of "Approving" the article may well be carried out by a separate group of users with different permissions within the site. 

  1. Once approvals has been turned on: 
  2. In the News Hub 'Site Pages' library we can see the status of 'Approval' in the standard view and version number can be added as an additional column:

    Approvals - Article View

  3. To submit a page for Approval within the News Page, you will see this appear as you run through the normal steps to create a news post. Instead of it saying "post news", it will indicate a "submit for approval" button instead. 

    Approvals - Submit Button

  4. Once you submit the page it will ask you to confirm with 'Comments'.

    Approvals - Submit Notes

  5. At this stage if you are permissioned to allow Approvals you will see the option on the page to review and complete approval.  Any outstanding Approvals will be seen in the 'Site Pages' library where it will show an 'Approval Status' of 'Pending'.

    Approvals - Review
  6. Once Approved the page will now be visible to all users in your organisation.
  7. This approval functionality is already there and provided by Microsoft however in addition to this, to make the approval process more user friendly, you can benefit from using Power Automate to send email notifications throughout the process. This means that approvals can be done directly through email or Microsoft Teams.