SharePoint News datasource

SharePoint News datasources let you pull the news posts and pages of a Microsoft SharePoint site into Wallboard and show them on your screens. The system reads the pages of the site you select, sorts them so the newest one comes first, and prepares everything you usually need for a news slide: title, description, publish date, a link to the original page, the page's thumbnail image, and an automatically generated QR code that points to the article.

This makes it a good fit for internal communication screens — company announcements, HR news, or "latest from the intranet" walls — without anyone having to copy content into Wallboard manually.

Prerequisites

Before creating a SharePoint News datasource, ensure you have:

• Microsoft SharePoint Online access
• A SharePoint site that contains the news posts / pages you want to display
• A SharePoint account with at least Read access to that site and its pages
• Administrative access to create Microsoft credentials in Wallboard
• Network connectivity to Microsoft services from your Wallboard server

What the datasource collects

For every page it finds on the selected site, the datasource provides:

Information	Description
Title	The display title of the news post
Description	The short summary / description of the page (if the page has one)
Publish date	When the page was created — available both as a timestamp and as a readable date
Link	The full URL of the page on SharePoint
Thumbnail image	The page's preview picture, if SharePoint has one for it
QR code	A ready-to-use QR code image pointing to the page, so viewers can open the full article on their phone
Page name	The technical file name of the page (for example Company-Update.aspx) — useful when the file name and the title differ

Items always arrive sorted by publish date, newest first, so the first item in the list is your most recent news post.

Good to know

• The datasource reads the Site Pages of the site you select. This includes news posts as well as other pages created on that site, so a site that is also used for regular pages will return those too. Keep news on a dedicated site (or filter the data in your content) if you only want announcements.
• Roughly 50 pages are collected per refresh. This is more than enough for a news wall, but it means very large sites will not be fully imported.
• Not every SharePoint page has a thumbnail or a description. Design your content so it still looks correct when those are missing.

Microsoft SharePoint News Credentials Setup

To create a SharePoint News datasource, you first need a Microsoft credential in Wallboard with SharePoint News access.

Creating Microsoft Credentials

1. Navigate to Cloud Credentials Go to Settings > Cloud Credentials and open the Microsoft tab

2. Add New Credential Click the add button (Add Microsoft credential) and choose the Sharepoint news scope

3. Fill in the credential details

• Name — a name you will recognize later in the datasource dropdown
• Tenant type — choose Work or School Account or Service Principal. Personal Account is not selectable for this scope, because news posts live on SharePoint sites rather than on a personal Microsoft account.
• If you choose Service Principal, three more fields appear: Authorization method (Shared secret), Client ID and Client secret from your Azure application.

4. Team Assignment (Optional) You can assign the credential to specific teams if your organization requires access control.

5. Authentication Process After filling the required fields:

• Click the Sign in with Microsoft button
• Complete the Microsoft sign-in flow
• Grant the requested permissions
• Verify that the credential shows up as authenticated

Microsoft Permissions Required

During sign-in, Microsoft asks you to grant read access so Wallboard can list your sites and read their pages:

• Read access to SharePoint sites and their pages
• Read access to groups, so the sites shared with you can be listed
• Read access to files, so page thumbnails can be loaded

Credential Modification

After a credential has been created, its scope and tenant type can no longer be changed — only the name, the manager user and (for Service Principal) the authorization details. If you need a different scope or tenant type, create a new credential.

tip

For a full walkthrough of the Microsoft credential screen, see the Microsoft credentials documentation.

Once authenticated, you can create external datasources using the acquired SharePoint News access.

Create Datasource

Go to Settings > Datasources and open the External Datasources tab. Click the add button (Add external datasource), then on the Choose a datasource type screen select Sharepoint news.

Basic Configuration

1. Credentials Select the Microsoft Credentials you created previously from the dropdown. Only credentials created with the SharePoint News scope appear here.

2. Site Once a credential is selected, the Site dropdown loads the SharePoint sites that account can reach. Pick the site whose news you want to display. You can type in the dropdown to search, and scroll down to load more sites.

Credential and site cannot be changed later

Both fields are locked once the datasource has been created. If you need to point at a different site or use a different credential, create a new datasource.

That is the complete type-specific setup — no field mapping or column selection is needed, because the news structure is always the same.

Advanced settings

3. Refresh settings Decide how often Wallboard checks the site for new posts:

• Refresh type — choose Simple interval to refresh every X seconds, or Advanced schedule (cron) to define exact times
• Refresh interval (seconds) — for the simple option, for example 3600 for hourly or 86400 for daily
• Cron expression and Timezone — for the advanced option
• Continue refreshing despite errors — when enabled, the datasource keeps refreshing even if a refresh fails. When disabled, it may stop after repeated failures to protect system resources.

Example Cron Expressions

• 0 */15 * * * * - Every 15 minutes
• 0 0 */2 * * * - Every 2 hours
• 0 0 8 * * 1-5 - Weekdays at 8:00 AM

Choosing a refresh interval

News does not change every minute. An hourly refresh is usually plenty and is much kinder to your Microsoft API limits. Note that your system administrator may enforce a minimum refresh time.

For more information about external datasource refresh options, see the External Datasource Refreshing documentation.

4. Cache settings These options control how Wallboard handles the images that come with the news posts:

• Store external data locally — saves the thumbnails on the Wallboard server so screens display them faster and keep working if SharePoint is briefly unreachable
• Remove broken file links automatically — cleans up references to images that no longer exist
• Clear cache when data updates — replaces the stored images with fresh ones on every refresh
• Update internal file references — keeps links working when files are moved or renamed

Recommended for news

Keep Store external data locally enabled. SharePoint thumbnail links are not meant to be used directly by displays for a long time, so caching them makes your news slides far more reliable.

5. Transformations If you want to reshape the data — for example, keep only the newest 5 posts, or drop posts without a picture — you can add transformations here. See the Advanced datasource settings documentation.

Using SharePoint News Data in Widgets

The news items arrive under channel.items, ordered newest first. channel.items[0] is therefore the latest post.

Fields available for every item:

• channel.items[0].title - the news post title
• channel.items[0].description - the short description of the post
• channel.items[0].link - the URL of the page on SharePoint
• channel.items[0].publishDate - publish date as a numeric timestamp (useful for sorting)
• channel.items[0].publishDateISO - publish date as a readable date/time value
• channel.items[0].media.url - the thumbnail image of the post
• channel.items[0].qrCode - a ready-to-display QR code image that opens the post
• channel.items[0].name - the file name of the page
• channel.items[0].guid - the unique ID of the page

Feed level information:

• channel.title - the name of the feed
• channel.description - a short description of the feed
• channel.publishDate - when the datasource last collected the data
• channel.items.length - how many news posts were found

Navigating the list:

• channel.items[0], channel.items[1], ... - the newest, second newest, and so on
• channel.items.filter(item => item.media) - only posts that have a picture

Typical bindings:

• Headline: channel.items[0].title
• Image: channel.items[0].media.url
• Date line: channel.items[0].publishDateISO
• "Scan to read" QR: channel.items[0].qrCode

Displaying the QR code

The QR code is delivered as a complete, ready-to-use image value — point an image widget at channel.items[0].qrCode and it renders on its own. Nothing needs to be generated or converted.

Common Use Cases

Company news wall: Latest intranet announcements in reception areas and hallways HR and policy updates: Highlight new policies with a QR code so employees can read the full text on their phone Department dashboards: Show only the news of a specific team's SharePoint site Break room screens: Rotate through the newest posts with their pictures Event promotion: Publish an event page in SharePoint once and let every screen pick it up automatically

SharePoint page design

The way your SharePoint pages are written directly shapes how they look on screen. Give every news post a clear, short title, fill in the page description, and set a thumbnail image — those three fields are what your screens will show.