Linchpin Enterprise News
Share your company's news with your employees
See the documentation for your Release
The general idea behind personal news subscriptions
If there's only a handful of news posts per month in your intranet, it's easy to keep up to date. You'll easily have time to read them all and still get some work done. But what if there's a dozen news posts per week? Or hundreds? All from different departments and projects, not everything relating to you, maybe a lot of it not even interesting to you?
That's where personal news subscriptions come in handy. The idea is that you can select, which kind of news is interesting to you and which is not. And then have a news stream that only contains relevant news and nothing of the overall noise. Sounds like a good idea? Then let's jump in on how to make that happen 
Subscribing to news is not the same thing as watching a space. These are two very different functionalities.
- Watching a space is a default Confluence functionality. You can read more about it in the Confluence documentation.
- Subscribing to news from a space is a functionality that comes with Linchpin Enterprise News. You can read the description on this very page.
Defining your subscriptions
Subscribing from the News Hub
When in the News Hub, you'll notice a cogwheel icon in the sidebar on the left, next to the entry "Subscriptions". Click on it, and you'll see a complete list of all available spaces in your intranet that you have at least viewing permissions for.
Maybe you already have subscriptions, because you subscribed to some spaces earlier or because there are default subscriptions set by an admin. Either way, existing subscriptions are listed first in alphabetical order. Then all the other spaces follow, again in alphabetical order.
The Icons to the right of every tile have the following meanings:
| Icon | Meaning | Possible actions |
|---|---|---|
| You haven't subscribed to the news from this space. | Clicking the icon will subscribe to the news from this space. |
| You have subscribed to the news from this space, either by doing it yourself or by having it set by an admin as a default. This is often done so that new users don't start off without any subscriptions and therefore empty news streams. | Clicking the icon will unsubscribe from this space. |
| It's obligatory to be subscribed to this space. This has been set by an admin. You'll have those news in your subscriptions no matter what. | None. |
Subscribing from a macro
If you are reading your subscriptions within a macro, either the Personal News Feed or the Cover Stories macro, you'll find a button "Select News" at the bottom of it. Click it to select the spaces you want to read news from. It will only show you those spaces you are eligible to read. The icons on the right hand side have the same meaning as described above.
Reading news items from your subscriptions
Via the News Hub
Entering the News Hub via the compass icon in the header, you'll at first see all news. On the left hand side in the sidebar there's an entry "Subscriptions". Click on that, and the view will switch to show you all news that stem from the spaces you selected for your news subscriptions.
Via the "Personal News Feed" macro
Insert the news feed on a page
To show your Personal News Feed on a page, simply insert the macro where you want to display it.
Please note: The contents of this Personal News Feed will always display the news the current user has subscribed to. If you look at a page that contains a Personal News Feed macro you'll probably see different news than your colleague, who looks at the same page.
Layouts for your Personal News Feed
There are two layout options for your news feed:
- The default layout contains preview images, social features, a text excerpt, information about space, category, author and date.
- The compact layout consists of a lean table containing the date, author, category and title of the news.
You can configure both of these layouts further: Decide which information you want to see and which you don't by checking the respective checkboxes.
Options for your Personal News Feed
- Decide on the number of news you want to display initially. If there are more news available than the number you define here, the feed will offer a button to load more news. The sorting is chronologically, so new postings will be displayed on top.
- If you want to links within a news item to open in a new window or tab, select the checkbox "New window/tab".
Save your configuration by clicking on the "Save" button.
Via the "Cover Stories" macro
Please read all there is to know about the Cover Stories macro on the respective page of this documentation: LEN - Use Cover Stories on your pages 2.9
Pro Tipp: Set up a Personal News Feed or Cover Stories with only certain spaces available to subscribe to
If you set up a dashboard or a dedicated news page, that you want others to use, you can offer them a Personal News Feed on that page, too. Simply insert the macro at the desired spot. Whenever someone visits the dashboard or news page, he or she will see his or her own Personal News Feed. That allows for a highly customizable news concept.
Users can select the spaces they want to read news from themselves from the frontend, without editing the page or macro. Of course they'll only be offered the spaces they have permission to read.
If your Confluence contains a lot of spaces however, and even more so if only some of them publish news at all, you might want to configure the Personal News Feed macro. You can set it to only offer those spaces for subscription that have one or several space categories applied. Simply type in the name of the relevant space category or categories. For example if all the spaces, that publish news at all, are labelled "news" as space category, you'd type in "news". Now when users want to pick their selection of spaces for the Personal News Feed, they'll be offered only those.