Introducing the new SharePoint start experience

Please see my feedback below from looking at the new feature rollout. Note that these are my personal insights only but feel they would relate to most of your customers.

What I do like:

I like that you can see pages you have recently worked on (draft and published). If this was the only thing additional you added to the Start page that would have been great.

What I don't like:

I don't like (or understand at all) the Page creation feature from the Start Page. See my reasons below:

• If you want to create a Page that will ultimately be published into a SharePoint site, you should go to the SharePoint site and create the page (simple). I've never heard of anyone saying this is an issue, and we are a company of 65k users with more than 100k SharePoint sites.
• For new Pages, you already have Create as a private draft in SharePoint and can share it with others - so why try to recreate this feature somewhere else?
• 
• If someone creates pages in their OneDrive and they then go on extended leave or leave the company - we have an issue. The pages are not assessable by others or lost completely.
• As part of our company's overall content policy, anything specific to our company that is intended for wider use (including SharePoint Pages) should not be created in OneDrive, so this new feature completely goes against our company policy.
• If users publish a page in their OneDrive, there is no way to then get it into the SharePoint site, so they will need to start the page from scratch causing a lot of frustration and wasted time.
• Many of our SharePoint sites have custom (including mandatory) metadata on their Page Libraries that needs to be filled in prior to the page being published. I don't see how this new feature can handle that which is an issue.
• A lot of our sites have custom page templates that they should be using for those sites - no option to use them here.
• Our SharePoint sites use various themes (colors), so when we create our pages in SharePoint, we immediately see exactly what the page would look like in that site (with the site theme). I can't see how this new feature can handle that.
• Bug: When you save as draft in OneDrive then publish to SharePoint, the folder created in the Site Assets > Site Pages library is just a guid, not the name of the page as it should be. This makes it difficult to see what folder relates to what page, especially if you have lots of pages. When you save in draft or publish to OneDrive you get the folder with the Page name as it should be in SharePoint. An example of what you get in SharePoint: "/sites/NAME_OF_SITE/SiteAssets/SitePages/24c8acf3-dffd-4370-9a6c-d812de4e3ad4/NAME_OF_IMAGE.png".
• Limitation: There is no way via the UI in OneDrive to find the Site Pages or Site Assets libraries, and no way to find the pages you have saved, so not sure why we would publish to OneDrive.
• Unsure: What happens if I set one of my OneDrive pages as the home page (Make homepage in the Site Pages library)?

I'm really not sure what the intent or purpose is to have personal pages saved in OneDrive at all. Is this part of a wider initiative/strategy that we (your customers) are not aware of?

Also, it says this is still in preview, but it's live in our environment which is set to Standard Release. My understanding is that we shouldn't see preview features unless something has changed recently. We need to ensure that anything rolled out to our environment is fully tested and ready for full production rollout.

What we would like (need) is a way to turn off the entire Start Page Page Creation feature and just have the list of pages you have recently worked on. Really hoping that this is possible - especially since it now breaches our overall content policy.

EDIT: Just noticed that we also get the Create new site button even though we have hidden the Site creation option. And when clicking on the button we just get a blank window which isn't great at all. This highlights the reason why we shouldn't be seeing Preview features in our tenant.