While traditional team sites can be provisioned using a customized self-service site provisioning wizard to create a customized team sites (e.g. with custom home page, doclibs, lists, folder structure etc), can do the same with the Office 365 Groups' modern team site? Like to seek what's the best practice if we want to do this. Thank you!

No, this is currently not possible...every Group Site uses the same site template. However, this is going to change in the future when we have the ability to attach a Group to an existing SPO site.

No ETA defined yet, but we should have this feature before the end of the year

Yes, but you need to know to trigger it. Site Designs apply automatically, you can even use them to trigger a Flow that could then use the SharepPoint PnP Powershell to customise the site further than is possible in Site Designs.

Steven Collier I've answered my own question by further exploration of the myriad settings pages, and a bit of more targeted Googling. Site Collection Features -> Site Policy -> activate. The "Information management policy settings" link then appears in the library settings in my Group site Document Libraries and I can enable labels, and the magic {Version} label and expose the SP doc version in Word. Now I just need to tinker with the level at which I can apply this so it automatically works on any new doc library that gets created anywhere in my O365 world.

Hi this should be possible aldo i never done it. Curious going to find it out real soon as i am going to provision groups and sites using pnp

Provision O365 Groups with custom SharePoint site template possible?

20 Replies

Alan Marshall
Steel Contributor
Nov 19, 2017
At the moment, you will need to build a provisioning solution using either custom code using CSOM and the PnP or Flow and the Microsoft Graph API. Using either of these methods, you can build your own group request form and then control the creation process and provision site assets like content types, columns and lists. I got POC working using Flow and the Graph API to create the group but haven't got to configuring the created site yet.
The other option coming up is the use of a Site Design that is defined in JSON with all the attributes mentioned in this conversation, this was announced at Ignite in a session on the theming of sites.
- Michael Armstrong
  Copper Contributor
  Jan 25, 2018
  Hi Alan,
  
  Do you have any more information on this? I'm looking to hook into the automatic group site creation process to apply a custom template, whether the group site is created via SharePoint, or from O365 / Outlook. Sounds like you've poc'd this, and I'd love to learn more about how you did it.
  
  Thanks!
  - Steven Collier
    MVP
    Jan 25, 2018
    If you are in Targetted release you can now use the new Site Design scripts, and customise the default templates as per :-
    
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/declarative-customization/site-design-overview
Fabian Alfonso
Copper Contributor
Aug 07, 2017
I tried to use this to save a list as a template for groups but didn't work.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_o365admin-mso_shareon/save-list-as-a-template-on-office-365-groups/886b5f92-6fab-450f-8b60-d97cc493324d

Has anyone else tried it?
Deleted
Jun 08, 2017
Hi this should be possible aldo i never done it. Curious going to find it out real soon as i am going to provision groups and sites using pnp
- jcgonzalezmartin
  MVP
  Jun 08, 2017
  No, this is currently not possible...every Group Site uses the same site template. However, this is going to change in the future when we have the ability to attach a Group to an existing SPO site.
  - Daniel Gomez
    Copper Contributor
    Jun 09, 2017
    Hi Juan Carlos,
    Do you know when this feature will arrive?
    
    Thanks!

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Provision O365 Groups with custom SharePoint site template possible?

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