They say change is as good as a holiday – and while most of us would be inclined to vehemently disagree that swapping office chairs with Jim from Accounts or switching up your screen saver is quite as thrilling as a week in the Bahamas – the theory does have merit.

So if sponsoring a company trip to a swim up bar in the south of Mexico isn’t your idea of responsible allocation of budget for this fiscal year, why not inject a little daily change into everyone’s life via your intranet?

New and updated content can appear on your intranet from a range of sources at virtually any time. Without a formal way of notifying users, valuable new information risks going unnoticed – particularly relevant considering the advent of applications such as iD CMS and the new Front End Security model in iD3.

Using Notifications and the News application, you can now conveniently display a feed of modified content in the layout of a subsite, ensuring your intranet updates quite literally make headlines.

Here’s how:

  1. First, you’ll need to create a Front End user whose Notifications RSS feed you can use. We called ours “wikinotification”, since we want to be notified of changes to the “Wiki” subsite. Make sure to remember the password, since you’ll need it for the next step!
    Note: if you’re using ActiveDirectory security, you may need to create this user in Active Directory if you’re not using IP Based Security.
  2. Next log in using this new account and navigate to the thing you want the News Category to report on, in our case, the Wiki subsite.
  3. Sign up to be notified, by expanding My Tools, selecting Notifications, and checking ‘Notify Me of Changes Made to this Item’.
  4. Click ‘View My Notifications RSS Feed’, and copy the RSS URL.
  5. Now simply create an RSS News category using this feed, which you can add to the layout of a subsite as normal. The beauty of it is that the RSS feed URL is unique to the user, so the one URL will work the same for everyone loading the news category!

Further Reading