Organization wide resources and news

Organization wide news and documents

While users are becoming more powerful toward their information system, SharePoint is evolving to fulfil the need to identify organizational wide resources.

In this article, we are going to cover the following capabilities a SharePoint administrator can provide to it’s users :

Organizational asset libraries
Tenant’s organizational news site

Let’s start with tenant’s organizational asset libraries

Note: This feature is not available for Office 365 Germany, Office 365 operated by 21Vianet (China), or Office 365 US Government plans.


This feature allow you to identify a SharePoint library, and let users pick documents when creating content in SharePoint. For the end user, when editing a page, the file picker popup will show a new section :

File picker


Using PowerShell and the Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell Module, you can set up to 30 organizational asset libraries. You can do so by typing the following code :

#Connect to SharePoint Online
Connect-SPOService -Url 'https://btcstech-admin.sharepoint.com'
#Identifying the library as an organizational asset library
Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary -LibraryUrl 'https://btcstech.sharepoint.com/sites/Behindthecollabscene/Official%20documents' -ThumbnailUrl "https://btcstech.sharepoint.com/sites/Behindthecollabscene/Official%20documents/header.png" -OrgAssetType ImageDocumentLibrary


It is important to notice that the Thumbnail image has to be inside the library you identify as an organizational asset library.

Another important point to consider is that when you identify an organizational asset library, you enable the CDN capability of your tenant. This critical point might be a problem for your information governance team, especially if you put personal information on this CDN…

When you type the CmdLet above, you will be prompted to accept Microsoft’s disclaimer :
“The CDN may have privacy and compliance standards that differ from the commitments outlined by the Microsoft Office365 Trust Center. Data cached through this service may not conform to the Microsoft Data Processing Terms (DPT), and may be outside of the Microsoft Office365 Trust Center compliance boundaries.”

You can find more information about the office 365 CDN here

Tenant’s organizational news site

This other feature allow you to set a SharePoint site to become an authoritative news source. It means that all news posted from this site will appear differently in the SharePoint environment.
See in the illustration bellow :

In order to set a SharePoint site as an authoritative news site, you will type the CmdLet bellow :

#Connect to SharePoint Online
Connect-SPOService -Url 'https://btcstech-admin.sharepoint.com'
#Identify The SharePoint site as an authoritative news site
Set-SPOOrgNewsSite -OrgNewsSiteUrl 'https://btcstech.sharepoint.com/sites/Behindthecollabscene'

So far I didn’t find any information about the limitations of this feature

I hope this will help you to build and intelligent information system, see you soon in the blog section !

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.