It is one of the first things anyone asks for on a new intranet: the home page should say hello to the person looking at it. "Good morning, Sarah" instead of "Welcome to the Contoso Intranet". SharePoint Online has no web part that does it - the Text web part shows the same words to everyone, and there is no token you can type that resolves to the viewer's name. This guide covers what people try instead, the specific reason most attempts look broken in a real tenant, and how to add a personalised welcome message properly.
What people try natively
- A Text web part that says "Welcome!" - the honest fallback, and the reason so many intranet home pages open with a sentence nobody reads. It is not personalised; it is just polite wallpaper.
- A script editor web part with a few lines of JavaScript - the classic answer from the classic-SharePoint era. Modern pages have no built-in script editor, and the community SPFx replacements need custom script enabled tenant-wide, which most security teams have deliberately turned off.
- An embedded Power App - can genuinely read the user and greet them, at the cost of a premium licence conversation, a visible loading delay on your most visited page, and an iframe that does not inherit your theme.
- Audience targeting - real, supported, and solving a different problem. It shows different content to different groups. It cannot put a person's name in a sentence, and it needs group membership resolved through a Graph permission.
- A Viva Connections card - greets people in the Viva experience and the Teams app, not on the SharePoint page most of your staff actually open in a browser.
Why the name is the hard part
Every guide that shows you how to fetch the current user stops at the point the real difficulty starts. Getting a name is easy. Getting a name you would be happy to print in 48-point type on the home page is not, because a tenant's display names are whatever years of joiners, mergers and helpdesk tickets left behind:
Berry, Mark- lastname-first, from a directory sync that nobody has revisited. Greet this person as "Berry" and they notice immediately.Mark Berry - Glow Cloud Solutions- an employer or department suffix, standard in tenants that host contractors or have been through an acquisition.Dr Jane Smith-Jones (Contractor)- an honorific, a double-barrelled surname and a bracketed status, all at once.Mark Berry, PhD- post-nominals, which a naive "take the first word" split handles fine and a naive "take the last word" split does not.jsmith@contoso.com- a service or shared account whose display name was never set. There is no first name in here to find.
A greeting that gets this wrong is worse than no greeting at all. "Good morning, Berry" or "Good morning, jsmith@contoso.com" is the kind of detail people screenshot and send to each other, and it undermines the page it was meant to warm up. Any approach you take needs a deliberate answer for the messy cases - including the answer that sometimes the right move is to drop the name and greet without one.
The other detail that catches people out: whose clock?
"Good morning" has to be morning for the person reading it. A greeting computed on the server, or from the page author's timezone, tells your Sydney office good evening over breakfast. If any part of your organisation is outside one timezone, the time of day has to be worked out in the browser, from the viewer's own clock - and it needs to re-check while the page is open, or the screen in reception will still say "Good evening" at nine the next morning.
The same applies to dates. A date rendered as 08/09/2026 means two different days depending on who is reading it, so it should follow the viewer's own regional format rather than the author's.
The supported way: an SPFx web part that reads the page context
The approach that works without custom script, without premium licences and without an admin consent conversation is a SharePoint Framework (SPFx) web part. The signed-in person's display name and locale are already in the page context that SharePoint hands every web part, so a greeting needs no Microsoft Graph permissions at all - there is nothing to request and nothing for an administrator to approve. The time of day is computed in the viewer's browser, so it is correct wherever they are.
This is what Glow Cloud Kit Greetings does. One web part on one page greets everybody who visits it differently: their name, their time of day, their regional date format. It cleans up display names before using them - stripping employer suffixes, bracketed asides, honorifics and post-nominals, and undoing lastname-first inversion - and when it cannot work out a name confidently it greets without one rather than guessing. Each person can correct their own name in one click, stored in their browser and never sent anywhere.
Because a home page greeting is also the natural place to mark an occasion, it can read birthdays and work anniversaries from a staff list you already have, looking up only the person viewing the page and only for today - read as them, so everyone sees exactly what their own permissions already allow. New starters get a welcome for their first few days. Setup instructions are in the Greetings setup guide.
A checklist for a welcome message that does not embarrass you
- Test it against your worst display names, not your own. Search your directory for names containing a comma, a bracket or a hyphen before you go live.
- Decide what happens when there is no usable name. Dropping the name is a feature, not a failure.
- Compute the time of day in the browser, and re-check it while the page is open.
- Let the date follow the viewer's regional format rather than the author's.
- Check what permissions the approach needs. A greeting should not be the reason your intranet asks for tenant-wide Graph consent.
- Give people a way to correct their own name, and keep that correction on their device - a greeting is not a reason to start storing preferences about individuals.
- Keep the styling in the page theme. A greeting with its own font size and colour is the first thing to look wrong after a rebrand.
Related
- Glow Cloud Kit Greetings - the personalised welcome web part for SharePoint, and the product overview.
- Greetings setup guide - install and configuration steps.
- How to build a staff directory in SharePoint - the same staff list drives birthdays and anniversaries.
- How to add employee recognition to SharePoint - the other half of marking an occasion.