Linchpin News Digest – Deliver intranet news via email

Among other things, the social intranet suite Linchpin enhances Confluence by offering users the opportunity to receive personalized company news in a visually appealing format. Through this it fulfills one of the most important requirements our customers put on an intranet.

Linchpin News Digest is a new app for Confluence and Linchpin recently launched by our development team. The app has not only been created to broadcast news in a Linchpin intranet but also deliver it to users via email on a regular basis.

News via email – Isn't that technically a contradiction?

After all, Atlassian Confluence and the Linchpin intranet suite help enterprises to arm themselves in the battle against internal emails. They provide a central "place of truth" where users can find all relevant information. This way, content is centralized and always available on the intranet in its most current form. Employees can discuss topics in a transparent way, right there on the intranet itself.

News and information that are a part of corporate communications can also be maintained from this one central point and delivered in such a way that old-fashioned media such as internal emails are rendered superfluous once and for all. This is where we get to the "technically" part.

And now, //SEIBERT/MEDIA is offering an extension of Linchpin Suite that sends news right to employees' inboxes? Does that not contradict the objectives of a modern intranet? Is that not clearly one of those superfluous communications scenarios that companies are in fact trying to overcome?

At this point, it's important to differentiate. Linchpin News Digest hasn't been created to "replace" one internal email newsletter with another internal email newsletter.

Internal "newsletters" can have good use cases too

As a software developer, you have to face up to the business reality where it is often the case that internal emails simply are abolished overnight. But it can be a fluid, sometimes lengthy process which throws up plenty of obstacles and resistance along the way. That's where a familiar, established medium such as email can actually be used as part of a targeted approach to promote and publicize the new, more efficient communication channels within the intranet.

In fact, emails can form a strategic component in the implementation of a new intranet, if they are used wisely and consciously. Certain types of emails can prove particularly helpful as a part of a multi-approach implementation campaign as a way of engaging employees and attracting them to use the new intranet, where they can then read the full version of the content. This is a valuable use case for the Linchpin News Digest app.

An extended rollout of a new system also makes for a good use case. Even when the intranet has been accepted within the company, is well established and even growing, its direct use is often still limited to the actual workplace. Employees are often unable to access the intranet on the move, from home, or while traveling because the system is behind a firewall . This is a common case when a solution such as Linchpin Mobile is yet to be implemented, which would allow employees to access the behind-the-firewall system without a VPN connection.

But users that aren't in the office want to stay up to date on what is happening in the company too and receive any relevant updates, and they should be able to. Linchpin News Digest makes this possible in a  practical and productive way, as employees will usually have mobile access to their emails. With this solution, the company can send out personalized news specific to the respective target group, e.g. sending relevant news to the field sales team but not to others.

Or perhaps there is especially important news content that should be distributed? An email format can support this use case too. So when you take a closer look, some use cases become apparent which don't contradict the primary concern.

And that brings us to the different functions available in the initial release of the Linchpin News Digest app.

An email with a summary of news from the intranet

Custom subject and introduction

Linchpin News Digest generates and dispatches informative emails and so has the time-saving advantage that most of the content can be generated automatically based on existing intranet news. At the same time, it also lets you make editorial changes. This enables the editorial team to enter a custom subject manually and add an introductory text.

Personalization

Traditionally, such news digests are sent to all employees within an enterprise, to all intranet users. However, such "send to all" emails are only appropriate in a few exceptional cases. Linchpin News Digest enables enterprises to employ a more granular, structured approach. The intranet team can predefine certain user groups or even individual users to receive certain emails. For example, they can send an email to the field sales team alone, without the rest of the company receiving it. (In fact, they can also select the sender of any digest email from any of the existing users and user groups in the system.)

Defining frequency and timing

Should the news emails be a temporary measure (e.g. as part of the rollout campaign) or a permanent one whereby recipients receive regular digests (e.g. as a weekly summary)?  The editorial team can easily determine the frequency of delivery and the exact delivery time for the next digest.

Basic settings for a digest email: Set the recipient, sender and frequency, and edit the subject.

Filtering content

When it comes to the content, the equivalent to the granular distribution of the digests is the flexible configuration of the actual news content. Intranet teams are free to choose and can decide which news articles make it into the news digest by predefining the news sources (Confluence spaces in their intranet). For example, the summary that is regularly sent to the field sales team and external team members does not need to contain all other news from the intranet, nor news from the IT or the internal office team. It wouldn't be very interesting for this target group, right? The editorial team can define exactly which sources a digest email uses to generate its content.

Which spaces should the news digest come from? The team can define this exactly as they wish

Visual quality assurance

Between the preparation and dispatch of the email, the Linchpin News Digest app includes a practical quality assurance step. The editorial team see a preview of the digest email at any time and see what it will look like if they were to send it in its current form.

The news digest preview is available at all times

Do you want to find out more about Linchpin with its flexible news concept and the additional features offered by Linchpin News Digest? Our Linchpin demonstration instance is fully updated with all of the functions and customizations mentioned above. And if you would like to test Linchpin with all of its apps yourself, you can simply request your own personal Linchpin test system – free of charge and without commitment!

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Further information

Linchpin - Social intranet with Confluence
Enterprise News Bundle for Confluence: support for your custom intranet news strategy
Enterprise News Bundle for Confluence: custom presentation of company news in the Confluence intranet

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