If you’ve noticed that SharePoint News posts no longer trigger a notification in the Teams Activity feed (the bell icon), you aren’t imagining things. This automatic behavior was phased out as Microsoft moved toward a more personalized, signal‑based model delivered through Viva Connections.
Below is a breakdown of how things currently behave for most tenants and what your options are.
1. Why the automatic pings stopped
In the past, publishing a News post could trigger a notification for everyone following a site. To reduce notification fatigue, Microsoft moved this behavior into Viva Connections. The goal is to ensure users see news that is relevant to them, rather than every update across the organization.
2. The current experience with Viva Connections
For many tenants, the Teams Activity feed is no longer an instant alert for every News post. Instead, notifications tend to work more like this:
Weekly catch‑up notifications
As of late March 2026, many users see a weekly summary in the Teams Activity feed highlighting unread SharePoint News.
Signal‑based alerts
Some users may receive notifications for news published by close collaborators or from sites they explicitly follow, provided the Viva Connections app is installed in Teams.
Note: This experience is highly dependent on tenant configuration and individual user settings, so behavior can vary across an organization.
3. Can Power Automate restore the bell icon?
This is where things get tricky.
The standard path
Power Automate can post a message or Adaptive Card to a Teams channel. This works well for visibility, but it does not trigger a notification in the Activity feed.
The developer path (Graph API)
While it is technically possible to send Activity Feed notifications using the Microsoft Graph API, this is not a general or supported replacement for SharePoint News alerts. It requires a registered Azure AD app, specific permissions, and is intended for custom line‑of‑business applications rather than simple News announcements. For most low‑code scenarios, this is not a practical or recommended approach.
The bottom line
The always‑on automatic ping is gone.
Viva Connections is the strategic replacement, focusing on weekly summaries and personalized signals rather than instant alerts.
Posting to a Teams channel with Power Automate remains the most reliable low‑code workaround for visibility.
There is no simple toggle to restore the old instant bell‑icon notification for every News post.
This aligns with recent support guidance that users must follow the SharePoint site for Viva Connections notifications. Even then, notifications are signal‑based and not guaranteed to appear as instant Activity feed pings.
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