SharePoint news - notifications sent via Microsoft Teams

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SharePoint news - notifications sent via Microsoft Teams

Jan Pruzinsky 20

Hi,

Could you please help me understand how audience targeting works when publishing SharePoint news? I’d like to use audience targeting to specify which group of people should receive the Teams notification.

From the documentation - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/connections/viva-connections-news-notifications#when-notifications-are-sent-via-microsoft-teams

Authors can set an audience on their news posts and notifications will honor the audience that is set. Only users part of the selected Microsoft 365 audience(s) specified receive notifications.

Even with audience targeting enabled, notifications are still being sent to users outside the selected audience group. I used an M365 group for the audience targeting.

Am I misunderstanding the documentation, or could this be a bug?

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Answer 1

Henry-N 10,540 Microsoft External Staff Moderator

Hi @Jan Pruzinsky,

Thank you for posting your question in the Microsoft Q&A forum.

Regarding the audience targeting issue. I’d like to ask a few quick questions to better understand your situation and assist you more effectively:

Where is the news being viewed and where are notifications coming from?
Is this occurring on a SharePoint hub site, a standard team/communication site, or within the Viva Connections home experience in Teams?
How are the unexpected users receiving the notification?
Are they actually seeing the news post appear in SharePoint?
Or are they only receiving a Teams notification when they shouldn’t?
Which audience targeting configuration are you currently working with? (Audience targeting can be applied at multiple levels site pages, navigation, news, and more so clarifying this will help pinpoint the issue.)

You could refer to these article: Target content to a specific audience on a SharePoint site - Microsoft Support

Target content in Viva Connections to specific audiences | Microsoft Learn
Set up Viva Connections in the Microsoft 365 admin center | Microsoft Learn

Thank you again for your time and understanding. While my initial response may not resolve the issue immediately, I’d like to gather more details about your situation so I can assist you more effectively.     

I really appreciate your patience, and I’m here to help. Looking forward to your response!     

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread   

Jan Pruzinsky 20 Reputation points

2026-02-24T15:38:37.0033333+00:00

We want to send Teams notification to users when SharePoint news is published. We followed the documentation - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/connections/viva-connections-news-notifications#when-notifications-are-sent-via-microsoft-teams

We have a communication site that is accessible in read‑only mode to approximately 2,000 users. When a moderator publishes new SharePoint News, we want to specify which group of people should receive a notification. Not every news post is relevant to everyone, so we want to target notifications to specific groups.

To control audience targeting, we use Microsoft 365 Groups. Users who are not part of the targeted group can still open the SharePoint News page (which is expected and perfectly fine), but they are also receiving a Teams notification — which we want to avoid.

Audience targeting is currently configured at the page level.
Henry-N 10,540 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-02-26T17:14:20.79+00:00
Hi @Jan Pruzinsky,

Thank you for the clarification this helps a lot.

From what you’ve described, it looks like there may be a misunderstanding in how audience targeting works for SharePoint News and how Viva Connections delivers Teams notifications.

Audience targeting on the SharePoint News web part or on the page itself does not control who receives Viva Connections Teams notifications.

The Teams notifications feature is part of the Viva Connections News experience, not the SharePoint site or the News web part. Because of that:

Audience targeting must be configured through Viva Connections, not only on the SharePoint page.

If audience targeting is set only on the SharePoint News page, Teams notifications may still go to all users who follow or have access to the site which explains what you’re seeing.

Microsoft’s documentation states notifications honor audience targeting only when the news is consumed through the Viva Connections News service not only via SharePoint.

To target notifications correctly, Microsoft requires using the Viva Connections News Reader and the associated audience targeting configuration:

Page level audience targeting controls visibility, not notification delivery. Teams notifications come from Viva Connections, so the targeting must be processed there.

Because this is a tenant level issue and need to take backend data investigation. A technical support engineer can perform a remote session to investigate the situation verify the backend configurations, and run any necessary synchronization tools to resolve the problem. If the issue requires further attention, they can escalate it to a specialized team for deeper analysis.

The Global Admin should create a service request with Microsoft support to get advanced technical assistance and diagnostics. For detailed instructions on how to get support, please refer to Get support - Microsoft 365 admin.   

For additional assistance, use this link to find the appropriate contact number: Global Customer Service phone numbers - Microsoft Support  

Thank you again for your time and understanding.

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SharePoint news - notifications sent via Microsoft Teams

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