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Connect Microsoft SharePoint
Lumicast can pull news and list content from Microsoft SharePoint and show it on your displays. This guide covers connecting a Microsoft account, creating a SharePoint News data source, and — the part most organisations ask for — aggregating news across an entire hub of sites, not just one.
App vs. data source
There are two ways to bring SharePoint news into Lumicast:
- The SharePoint News app — a ready-made, styled news carousel. Best for a single site with minimal setup.
- A SharePoint News data source (this guide) — the flexible option that you bind onto your own pages. Whole-hub aggregation is only available on the data source.
Requirements
- A Microsoft account that can read the SharePoint site(s) you want to show. During connection you sign in and consent; Lumicast requests read-only access (
Sites.Read.All) — it never writes to SharePoint. - For whole-hub aggregation: your SharePoint should already use a hub site (an admin concept in SharePoint — one site designated as a hub, with other sites associated to it). If your intranet is organised as a hub with department/team sites hanging off it, you're set.
1. Create the connection and data source
- Go to Data Sources and click New data source.
- Choose Microsoft SharePoint, then News.
- When prompted, connect your Microsoft account. Sign in with an account that can read the relevant sites and accept the consent prompt. The connection is reusable for other SharePoint and Teams data sources and apps.
- Pick the Site — only sites the connected account can read appear in the list.
- Set the options below.
- Save. Lumicast starts polling and stores the latest news.
2. Configuration options
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Site | The SharePoint site to read news from. In hub mode, this is your hub site. |
| Fetch full article content | On: fetches each post's full body (heavier). Off: summary only. See the note below. |
| Include news from the entire hub | Treats the selected site as a hub and aggregates news across the hub and every site associated with it. Off = just the selected site (classic behaviour). |
Full content vs. number of items
Fetching full bodies is the expensive part, so it changes how many items we load:
- Full content on — each article's body is fetched individually, so we keep the 20 most recent items.
- Full content off (summary only) — no per-article fetch, so we load the 100 most recent items.
In hub mode, full bodies are fetched only for the final merged list, so turning it on stays affordable even across many sites.
3. How whole-hub aggregation works
SharePoint's own "news from this hub" rollup is a page web part — there's no single API that returns it. Lumicast reproduces it:
- From your selected hub site, it discovers every associated site using SharePoint search.
- It fetches the newest news posts from the hub and each associated site.
- It merges them into one feed, newest first, and tags each article with the site it came from — so a bound page can show the source site alongside the headline.
New sites and posts appear automatically once SharePoint has indexed them — no need to re-configure the data source when a new department site is added to the hub.
An associated site that the connected account can't read is quietly skipped rather than failing the whole feed, so make sure the account has access to every site whose news you want to show.
Classic subsites are not hub sites
This aggregates sites associated to a hub — each is its own site. For example, a hub at .../sites/company-hub with associated sites .../sites/marketing and .../sites/hr. It does not aggregate old-style subsites nested inside one site (.../sites/company-hub/archive). If your content lives in a hub of separate sites — the modern SharePoint layout — you're in the right place.
Troubleshooting
"This Microsoft connection needs to be reconnected." Lumicast shows this when it can no longer access SharePoint in the background — most often because your Microsoft tenant now enforces multi-factor authentication (via Security Defaults or a Conditional Access policy) and the saved sign-in predates that policy. Fix: open the connection and reconnect, completing the MFA prompt. The refreshed sign-in resumes access. If it keeps recurring, the tenant's MFA policy is also challenging the unattended background sign-in — a Microsoft Entra ID administrator needs to exclude the connection's app from that policy (requires Entra ID Premium for Conditional Access). Contact Lumicast support if you're unsure. (The underlying Microsoft error is "multi-factor authentication required",
AADSTS50076.)Hub news is missing some sites. Discovery relies on the SharePoint search index. Freshly created sites or posts can take minutes to a few hours to be indexed and won't appear until then. If an established site never shows up, confirm the connected account can actually read it and contact support.
Whole-hub toggle shows only the hub site's own news. This usually means the associated sites aren't indexed yet (see above). If discovery can't run at all, Lumicast safely falls back to just the selected site — so a hub data source never returns less than the same site without the toggle.
Only summaries appear, not full articles. Turn on Fetch full article content. Note this reduces how many items are loaded (see the tip above).