The Unified Experience news feed displays SharePoint news from your intranet in the Discover menu, accessible from the bar that Jint adds to your SharePoint sites. Your employees can view it with one click, from the site they are currently on.

This article describes what your employees see and how to configure the feed in Jint Portal: activation, news source, display and sorting, and audience targeting.

If you have not yet enabled the Unified Experience on your intranet, you can read the dedicated article: How do I enable the Unified Experience?

📋 Table of contents

1. Overview of the news feed
2. Access the settings in Jint Portal
3. Enable the news feed
4. Configure the news feed
5. What your employees see
6. Best practices
7. Useful resources

1. Overview of the news feed

In the Discover menu, the What's happening section displays your news as cards. Each card displays the news image, title, date, and time. Clicking a card opens the news item in a new tab.

Use cases

• Give your employees a single entry point to the latest news.
• Limit the news displayed to specific sites on your intranet.
• Reserve certain news items for specific audiences.
• Choose the number of news items displayed and their sort order.

2. Access the settings in Jint Portal

Settings are configured in Jint Portal. Your account must have the Global Administrator or Unified Experience role.

1. Sign in to Jint Portal.
2. From the menu, open SharePoint, then Unified Experience.
3. Click the News Feed tab.

The Unified Experience page has seven tabs: Activation, Alert, Search, News Feed, Events, Navigation, and Viva Engage. The Navigation and Events tabs configure the other content in the Discover menu.

3. Enable the news feed

At the top of the tab, the SharePoint News toggle displays SharePoint news in the Discover tab of the Unified Experience.

As long as this toggle is disabled, your employees will not see any news in Discover.

4. Configure the news feed

The tab contains three sections, in this order: News source, Display and sorting, and Audiences.

4.1 News source

This section defines the sites from which news is retrieved.

• Display news from all site collections: when enabled, the feed includes news from all site collections. When disabled, you choose the sites yourself.
• URLs of sites containing news: enter the address of a site, then click Add. To remove a site from the list, click the X to the right of its address.
• The target site is a Modern SharePoint site: enter the address of a Modern SharePoint site.

4.2 Display and sorting

This section defines how many news items are displayed and in what order.

4.3 Audiences

This section reserves certain news items for some of your employees. If you do not configure any audience, everyone can see the news.

Two independent targeting mechanisms are available:

• Jint audiences: they compare a property in each employee's profile with a column on the news page. You create them using the Add an audience button.
• Modern SharePoint audiences: SharePoint's native targeting, based on Microsoft Entra groups. You enable it using Take modern SharePoint audiences into account.

• Enable audiences: enables targeting using Jint audiences. As long as no audience has been added to the table, this setting has no effect.
• News without audiences are visible to everyone: when enabled, news items for which all audience columns are empty remain visible to all your employees. When disabled, they are no longer displayed.
• Take modern SharePoint audiences into account: see Modern SharePoint audiences.
• Result source ID: see Result source ID.

Added audiences are displayed in a table below the Add an audience button. You can sort this table by title.

Add a Jint audience

A Jint audience connects a SharePoint user profile property to a column on your news pages. A news item is displayed to an employee if every audience property entered on the page matches their profile. Multiple values are supported.

1. In the Audiences section, click Add an audience. A panel opens on the right side of the screen.
2. Complete the fields in the panel (see the table below).
3. Click Apply. To close the panel without creating the audience, click Cancel.
4. Make sure that Enable audiences is enabled, then click Save at the bottom of the page.

💡 Example: to target news by geographic site, enter Title = “Site,” User property = Office, Term set ID = the identifier of the “Sites” term set, and Managed property (search) = RefinableString01.

Where to find these values

These values can be found in the SharePoint admin center.

• User property: More features > User profiles > Manage user properties.
• Term set ID: Content services > Term store. Click the term set: the identifier is shown under Unique identifier.
• Managed property (search): More features > Search > Manage search schema. Map the crawled property for your column to a RefinableStringXX property: ows_taxId_<column name> for a managed metadata column, or ows_<column name> for a text column. Then start a reindexing operation (Site settings > Offline availability and search > Reindex site).

⚠ After adding or modifying a managed property mapping, SharePoint must reindex the content. Allow a few hours to 24 hours before targeting works.

💡 To check whether a managed property is indexed correctly, search for example for RefinableString01:* in SharePoint search. If no results are returned, the mapping has not yet been indexed.

Modern SharePoint audiences

When enabled, the Take modern SharePoint audiences into account setting respects SharePoint's native audience targeting, defined on the Site Pages library of each site.

• A targeted news item is displayed only to employees who are members of one of the targeted groups.
• A non-targeted news item is displayed to everyone.

This mechanism is independent of Jint audiences.

Result source ID

This field accepts the identifier of a SharePoint search result source. It is only used if a dedicated result source restricts the scope of the news. Otherwise, leave it blank.

• It is taken into account only if Take modern SharePoint audiences into account is enabled.
• It applies only to modern news, not classic publishing pages.

⚠ If the entered value is not a valid identifier, it is ignored without an error message. Check it carefully.

To find the identifier, open the result source:

• in the SharePoint admin center: Search > Manage result sources;
• or at the site level: Site settings > Result sources.

The identifier appears in the page address, after sourceid=.

4.4 Save your changes

Click Save at the bottom of the page to apply your settings. Cancel discards your changes. Each Unified Experience tab is saved independently of the others.

5. What your employees see

Each setting on the tab has a direct effect on the Discover menu.

Clicking a card opens the news item in a new browser tab.

6. Best practices

Test targeting with two accounts

After configuring an audience, open Discover with an account that belongs to the audience and with an account that does not. Only the first account should see the targeted news item.

Save each tab

Each Unified Experience tab is saved separately. Click Save before moving to another tab.

7. Useful resources

Jint Help Center articles

• New Unified Experience - Feature overview
• How do I enable the Unified Experience?
• Jint Portal - General overview

Microsoft documentation

• Target navigation, news, files, links, and Web Parts to specific audiences: native targeting, used by Take modern SharePoint audiences into account.
• Manage SharePoint user profiles: to find the User property.
• Open the term store management tool: to find the Term set ID.
• Manage the search schema in SharePoint: to map the Managed property (search).
• Request indexing and reindexing of a site, library, or list: to do after creating a new mapping.
• Manage result sources: to find the Result source ID.

Can't find the answer to your question? Contact Jint Support.