Greetings

Greetings is the opening line of your intranet. It greets the signed-in person by name, knows what time of day it is for them, and marks their birthday and work anniversary from a list your tenant already has. Nothing is configured per person: one web part on one page greets everybody who visits it, each of them differently.

Permissions

None. Greetings requests no Microsoft Graph permissions at all, so there is nothing for an administrator to approve. The person's name and regional format come from the page itself, and the birthdays list is read over SharePoint as the signed-in person - so everyone sees exactly what their own permissions already allow.

Nothing about who views the page is recorded or sent anywhere. A viewer's own name correction (below) is kept in their browser and never leaves their device.

Set up

1. Add Glow Cloud Greetings to a page - the home page is the usual spot.
2. It works immediately with no configuration: a time-aware greeting and the viewer's name.
3. Everything below is optional and off unless stated.

The greeting

• Time of day - good morning, afternoon or evening, worked out from the viewer's clock, so a colleague in Sydney gets their morning while London gets its afternoon. All three wordings are yours to change.
• Where the day turns - the afternoon and evening boundary hours are sliders, because a factory shift pattern and an office do not agree on when evening starts.
• Or a fixed greeting - turn the time off and everyone gets one wording, "Welcome" or whatever you prefer.
• Heading level - H1 to H4, setting both the size and the semantic heading, so the page keeps a correct outline for screen readers.

A page left open overnight re-checks at the next boundary, so a screen in a reception area does not sit on "Good evening" until somebody reloads it.

Names

SharePoint gives the web part whatever is in the person's display name, and real tenants put all sorts in there. Greetings strips bracketed asides, an employer suffix, honorifics and post-nominals, and undoes lastname-first inversion, before taking the given name.

When it cannot work out a name with confidence it drops the name and greets without it, because a greeting that is silently wrong is worse than one that is short.

Each person can correct their own name. Switch on the personal correction and a quiet "Not Mark?" link lets the viewer set what they want to be called. It is stored in their own browser, for that web part, and never leaves their device. This is off by default.

There is also an author "preferred name" field. It sets one name for everybody who sees the page, so it is only useful on a personal or single-team page - which is exactly what its label says. For a shared home page, use the personal correction instead.

Birthdays, anniversaries and new starters

Greetings reads the same StaffBirthdays list the Directory provisions and Cheers reads. Only the person viewing the page is looked up, and only for today - a single server-filtered row, read as them.

• Birthdays - wording is yours; the default is "Happy birthday".
• Work anniversaries - wording takes the number of years, defaulting to "{years} years today".
• New starter welcome - for their first few days a new starter gets a welcome instead of the usual line. You choose how many days and the wording.

Anniversaries and the new starter welcome need a StartDate column, and most tenants do not have one because nothing else in the kit creates it. The settings pane has an Add the start date column button that adds it safely, and can be run twice with no harm. The list's existing permissions then let each person fill in their own row and nobody else's.

The list can live anywhere - leave the site blank to use the current one. If the configured list cannot be read, the tenant-wide pointer the Directory writes is consulted as a fallback, so the common layout of a home page on the comms site and the list on HR's works without anyone typing a URL.

Looks

Nine designed looks: plain, solid colour, soft tint, gradient fade, two colours, side rule, underline, card with an accent bar, and photo. Each is theme-aware and works out its own text contrast, so the greeting stays legible on your brand colour without anyone checking. Add rounded or square corners and a colour of your own.

There is deliberately no font size, font style, font colour, alignment or CSS unit setting. Those ask you to describe in numbers something the theme already knows, and they are the reason home page web parts drift out of house style. Pick a look instead.

The second line

Off by default. When switched on it shows one of:

• Today's date, in the viewer's own regional format.
• A message you type - several, rotating one per day, each with an optional start and end date so it appears and retires on its own.
• A message from a list, when content authors rather than page authors should own the words.

One message shows per day, the same one for everyone that day.

Audience targeting

Greetings has no audience targeting setting, on purpose: every audience feature in the kit resolves the viewer's groups through a Graph permission, and this app spends none. The substitute needs no setting at all - put the message list somewhere only the intended people can read, and only they will see it, because every read runs as the viewer.

Related

• Greetings product overview.
• Directory setup guide - provisions the same birthdays list.
• Cheers setup guide - reads it too, for celebration cheers.
• Installing Glow Cloud Kit apps.