Bulletin Boards

The component to strengthen the corporate community with a space in your SharePoint intranet where to post personal announcements.

What is Bulletin Boards

Our component facilitates the exchange of information among intranet users, motivating them to connect with colleagues for buying or selling an item or organizing an event. It strengthens the company community through a direct and spontaneous medium.

Everyone in the company has access to the bulletin board. The free-text search bar allows you to filter content to find announcements of your interest. Once found, simply click on the email icon to get in touch with the offer owner. The side button allows you to publish an announcement with a title, a description, and a photo from your personal profile.

Explore the advantages of Intranet.ai Bulletin Boards by clicking here to learn more.

Add the Bulletin Boards web part to a SharePoint page

If your page is not already in edit mode, click Edit at the top right of the page.
Hover your mouse above or below an existing web part and you'll see a line with a circled +, like this:
Click on it and, in the web part search box, enter Board to quickly find and select the Notice Board web part.

Configuration

As a first step, you need to enter the link to the site where the Notice board posts list is registered, usually coinciding with the intranet site.

In the second field, the list called Notice board posts must be selected from the panel.

Then the layout of the web part can be selected: Default or Compact. The default option is suggested when the web part is set up on a dedicated page, whereas the compact layout is recommended if the web part is set up on a page that already has content, such as the home page.

You can choose the order in which to arrange the advertisements according to two criteria:

Select a property to sort documents: by clicking on the field, a drop-down menu appears from which you can select one of the following options:

Select the direction of the sort: you have selected Date created in the previous field, here you can choose to sort advertisements from the least recent or from Z to A. If you have selected Post title in the previous field, here you can decide to sort advertisements from A to Z or from the most recent. If you have selected Post author in the previous field, here you can choose to sort advertisements from A to Z or from the most recent.

If you're not in edit mode already, click Edit at the top right of the page.

As regards the following option, you have the possibility to implement an approval flow whereby advertisements are published on the notice board only after an approver has checked and approved them. In order to add this flow, two actions are required:

Implement the flow manually with Power Automate;
Activate the Enabling approval? option while configuring the web part.

When you activate the Enabling approval? option, the following fields appear:

Select users or approver group: enter the Azure AD group including the approvers.
Enter the text to be shown as a disclaimer: here you can customize the text shown as a disclaimer. This text informs the user that the post will be published after being approved. If you leave this field blank, the default text will be used, which is "The announcement will be visible after the approval".

The last settings are as follows:

Enter the number of posts to load: specify how many advertisements you want to make visible in the web part.
Enter the duration of the posts (months): specify for how many months you want the posts to be visible in the web part.
Number of photos that can be uploaded: set the maximum number of pictures the user can upload when creating a post. Please note that if you select 0, this feature will be deactivated, so users won't have the possibility of uploading photos.

If you change the maximum number of photos from 1-5 to 0, any pictures users may have attached to posts published previously will be hidden.

Enter the link to the page with the extended version: enter the link to the page in which the extended version of the web part is inserted. This field is to be filled in only if you have configured the web part with the compact layout on a different page, otherwise it is not necessary.

Create a new post

To create a new post, a few steps are required, which are listed below:

Access the Site contents by clicking on the Settings icon, which is located on the top right of your Intranet’s homepage.

Access the list named Notice board posts, where you have to enter the various posts you want to view one by one.

Click on New and a window will open with fields to be filled in.

Fill in the following fields. The fields marked with an asterisk (*) are mandatory:

Title: insert the post title.
Body: enter the text you want to appear in the post.
Approval date, Approver, Approvers emails, Status: these fields serve the purpose of saving information on the approval flow, if you have decided to implement it.
Attachments: attachments such as photos can be added if necessary.

Alternatively, it is possible to add a new post to the bulletin board directly from the page where the web part is configured. You just need to click on Add a post to open a panel directly on the page. Here you can write the title and the text of the post as well as upload one or more pictures through the Load images button, if this functionality is active. Please note: the Load images button is visible only if a number from 1 to 5 has been set as maximum number of photos to be uploaded (see Configuration). When you have completed the post, click on Save to publish it.

Here is an example of how the Bulletin Boards web part is displayed on the page:

The web part is composed of the following elements:

A list of posts, which includes the title of the post, the name and profile picture of the author, the creation date of the post and the text.
An email icon which can be clicked to contact the post author.
A button which can be clicked to publish a new post, as explained above.
A search bar which allows you to find posts of your interest.

Configure the Notice Board Posts list

The Notice Board Posts list requires a specific configuration so that SharePoint intranet visitors can publish posts. To learn how to configure this list, read the dedicated guide. In particular, please refer to the Second type of configuration section.