Chapter 5
IN THIS CHAPTER
Getting a feel for the concept of a site
Discovering the available site templates
Creating a new site using a template
Figuring out how sites can be linked with Hub Sites
In Chapter 1, you get up and running with Office 365 and SharePoint Online in a matter of minutes by creating a SharePoint site using the Team Site template. In this chapter, you take a deeper dive into SharePoint sites. You learn how to create your own site using SharePoint’s various site templates and how to access it in Office 365. You explore some of the basic components of a site such as its navigation and pages. You also learn how SharePoint sites can be linked together using a new feature called Hub Sites.
If you are following along with the book, you created a Team Site in Chapter 1. You then learned how to open that site using the SharePoint Mobile App in Chapter 4. You can also open the same Team Site using your favorite web browser such as Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple Safari. (And if you haven’t yet taken a peek at Chapters 1 and 4, do not despair — keep reading. You can get caught up along the way.)
To access the SharePoint Team Site you create in Chapter 1, you must first sign into Office 365 and then choose SharePoint from the available apps. Here’s how:
Open your web browser and navigate to www.office.com
.
If you have signed in before, your dashboard will load. If you have not yet signed in, you will need to sign in here with the credentials you create in Chapter 1.
Click the waffle icon in the top-left corner of the screen and then click SharePoint, as shown in Figure 5-1.
The Frequent Sites page appears, which lists your frequently visited SharePoint sites (see Figure 5-2). In this case we only have the Team Site we created when we signed up for Office 365 in Chapter 1.
You can also click SharePoint from the main dashboard to access the Frequent Sites page. However, if you are in another app, such as Outlook, you can always get to SharePoint using the waffle icon in the top-left corner.
Click the SharePoint site you want to open.
Presto! Your SharePoint site opens and you are ready to begin exploring it, as shown in Figure 5-3.
FIGURE 5-1: Selecting SharePoint from the main office.com landing page.
FIGURE 5-2: The Frequent Sites page in SharePoint.
FIGURE 5-3: The main page of a SharePoint Team Site.
Although you can choose from many different site templates when you create a SharePoint site, the most popular is the Team Site template, as it contains a number of useful features for teams to share content and apps and collaborate on projects.
When you first open your newly created Team Site, you can do a number of things right out of the gate. From the left-side navigation menu, you can partake in Conversations (which is an integration with Outlook), you can store your digital documents in the prebuilt Document Library app (Documents), you can open OneNote to keep shared notes (Notebook), and you can create new web pages (Pages).
The default page that appears when you first open your Team Site is the Home page, which is also always accessible by selecting Home from the navigation menu. The Team Site Home page has lots of useful functionality. It includes a section for News, Quick Links, Activity, Documents, and site Comments. You can also customize the Home page sections to fit your own needs, which you learn how to do in Chapter 6.
All SharePoint Team Sites have the same features. If you're using a new Team Site, your site should be similar to the one shown earlier in Figure 5-3. If your site has been customized, it may look slightly different. Never fear: All the same features are there. You may just have to hunt a little bit to find them.
Almost every SharePoint site contains the following major sections:
Generally speaking, the header and left navigation pane stay fairly consistent, whereas the body of the page changes to display the content of the web page. This is very similar to how most websites work.
On a default Team Site (see Figure 5-3), you see a section in the lower-right part of the page called Documents. This seemingly innocuous little section is actually an example of SharePoint at its finest.
In a nutshell, Documents is a digital repository to store your files. Under the covers, however, Documents is a combination of pages, apps, and Web Parts. (You discover how it all comes together in the next few chapters.) Adding a new file, such as a Microsoft Word document, to Documents is as simple as clicking the New link in the Documents header, as shown in Figure 5-4. After a document is located in SharePoint, you have all the content management functionality right at your fingertips, such as check-in/check-out, versioning, security, and workflow.
FIGURE 5-4: Adding a new document to a SharePoint Team Site.
A site without any users is a bit pointless. You can share your SharePoint Team Site in a number of different ways. The easiest way to share is to invite users to the site. When you share a site, the people you are sharing with will receive an email with all the information they need to access the site.
To share your SharePoint site using your web browser, follow these steps:
Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner and select Site Permissions.
The Site Permissions window opens.
Click the “Invite people” button and choose to add members to the group of users who can access the site or choose to share the site only.
In this example, we will choose to share the site only, as shown in Figure 5-5, which opens the Share Site window shown in Figure 5-6.
If you choose to add members to the group you will be presented with a list of users who are already part of your Office 365 subscription. If you are following along with the book, you will only see a single user (unless you have added more along the way).
Enter the email address of the person with whom you want to share the site.
If the person is outside of your organization, a message that alerts you to that fact appears. This notice is important, as you want to be careful not to share information outside of your organization if it shouldn’t be shared. If you are an administrator, you can turn off the ability to share with people outside of the organization completely.
FIGURE 5-5: Inviting people to a SharePoint site.
FIGURE 5-6: Sharing a SharePoint site by sending an email.
To find out more about activating and deactivating features, check out Chapter 17. And of course, you must also have the right permissions to activate the feature you’re looking for.
To share your SharePoint site using the SharePoint Mobile App, follow these steps:
Choose how you want to share the site.
From this point the process is the same as you would use for sharing anything else from your mobile device. For example, on iOS you see the familiar sharing mechanism displays, as shown in Figure 5-8.
FIGURE 5-7: The Share icon on a SharePoint site on an iPhone.
FIGURE 5-8: Sharing a SharePoint site from an iPhone using the SharePoint Mobile App.
You can create a new SharePoint site using your web browser or the SharePoint Mobile App. When you create a SharePoint site, you first must select the site template you want to use. Each site template includes all the preconfigured elements you need, such as specific features, default pages, and navigation. The most popular site template is still the Team Site template since it contains a broad set of features designed for team interaction and collaboration. But it is important to understand the other templates that are available so you can use them when you need them.
You can create a new SharePoint site using your web browser or the SharePoint Mobile App. The following sections show you how.
To create a new site using your web browser, follow these steps:
Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner of the screen and choose Site Contents.
The Contents screen for the site appears.
Click the New drop-down menu and select Subsite, as shown in Figure 5-9.
The New SharePoint Site screen appears, as shown in Figure 5-10.
In the Template Selection section select a site template for the site.
The Team Site template is the default, but there are several other site templates to choose from as well. We recommend creating one of each and exploring them to understand how the templates work. This is important so you can create the right site for your particular situation. In this example we will choose to create a Blog site.
If you are ever in doubt about which template to use, you are usually safe with the Team Site template.
Click Create to create the new SharePoint site.
After a few moments your new site will be created and opened in your browser, as shown in Figure 5-12.
FIGURE 5-9: The New drop-down menu.
FIGURE 5-10: The New SharePoint Site screen.
FIGURE 5-11: Setting permssions in the New SharePoint Site screen.
FIGURE 5-12: A new SharePoint site based on the Blog template.
To create a new site using the SharePoint Mobile App, follow these steps:
FIGURE 5-13: Creating a site in the SharePoint Mobile App on an iPhone.
If you aren’t a site administrator, you won’t have permissions to create a new SharePoint site. In this case, you need to request one. Most organizations have a process for requesting a team site. For example, you might send an email request to the SharePoint administrator or fill out a form.
Whatever you have to do to get your own SharePoint team site in your organization, get one. At a minimum, you need to provide your SharePoint administrator with the following information to get a team site:
http://intranet.company.com/sites
http://portal/projectsites
http://sharepoint/sites
Your organization may also ask who has permission to access the site. By default, all SharePoint team sites have three basic kinds of users, which are called SharePoint groups:
You need to decide which users fit into these three SharePoint groups. SharePoint offers more than just these three groups, and you can create your own groups to meet your needs.
Your site’s users must be connected physically to your network or have permission from your network administrator to access your network remotely. Some companies set up a special kind of deployment for SharePoint, called an extranet, that provides a secure way for non-employees to log in to their SharePoint team sites without actually being on the internal company network.
Setting up SharePoint in an extranet environment can be done in lots of ways. Configuring a SharePoint extranet in your company’s network can be complex and is outside the scope of this book. However, the good news is that SharePoint Online, which is part of the Office 365 suite, eliminates many of the technical barriers to creating an extranet.
SharePoint 2019 includes a new feature called Hub Sites, which enables you to group SharePoint sites together in a single unit called a hub site. In particular, with a hub site you can group navigation together to make sites easier to navigate as a group and create simple content rollups and search areas. If you have the need for more than one SharePoint site, and you need to group them together and have a single entry into all of the sites, a hub site is the way to go.
Hub sites are brand new in SharePoint Online, and as of this writing, you need to use PowerShell in order to create a hub site. Once the hub site is created, you can manage it through the web interface.
Microsoft provides detailed guidance on creating a hub site using PowerShell, but be warned. PowerShell is a command-line interface and is not for the faint of heart. If you want to read about creating a hub site using PowerShell, check out the Microsoft article “Set up your SharePoint hub site” on the Microsoft Office support site. The easiest way to find it is to go to support.office.com
and search for the exact title.