Forum Discussion
Communication Site vs Team Site
Mark-KashmanOther than what other Office 365 tools are autogenerated (i.e. planner, onenote), I am struggling to see the difference between communication sites and team sites. It seems all the new we...
Adding my frustration...
I find the choice between Team and Communication site to be increadibly confusing. We're just a small company who needs an intranet, plain and simple. When I created our company's site about 6-12 months ago, I used a Communication site. Why, I'm not sure. I think I needed a certain web part or something, though I'm not sure if I ended up using it.
Now I wanted to add the Planner Web Part, but for some reason that's exclusive to team sites. I guess I could move everything over (manually), but what about the Sharepoint document library I created? It doesn't seem I link to it from a team site. Was it wrong of me to use a communication site for the company's file server in the first place?
Oh pretty please give me a simple advise on what to use. Why can't we just have one single "Modern Site" template and then let users customize it to the way they like over time?
Agreed! I share the same frustration. As a part-time SharePoint Administrator I do not have the expertise to catch the implications of the terms and language used in the help texts and discussion forums on the topic. I also started out with a communication site because the main purpose was to broadcast information, only to find out the various limitations later. One by one.
I now think that if there is any level of user/guest contribution or permission management one should go for a team site!?!
The preconfigured design-template aspect of the team vs. communication site's initial setup is secondary to me. What I need is an overview of hard limitations in terms of web parts, permission management, user/guest grouping, navigation etc. Who would guess that it is not possible to implement a left side navigation bar in a communication site?
What are the things you can NOT do when you start out with a team site? Any?
I wrote this up as I was doing my testing. Biggest for me was communication sites don't allow guests.
And not having Planner.
What are the technical differences between a communication site and a team site?
- Communication sites don't have the option of creating a classic wiki style page that allows our old customizations from on-premise to work.
- Pages in a communication site can have a full width section that can contain an image or a hero webpart. Team sites only have a one column section, and it doesn't go the full width.
- Communication sites don't have an Office 365 group. Security is done with the standard SharePoint permissions groups. No guests allowed.
- Communication sites have no Planner, because there isn't a group. Though you could link to another groups Planner, but permissions would be tricky.
- Otherwise, webparts look the same.
- Since there isn't a left navigation column in a communication site, images in the top of pages or on a full width section bleed fully to the edge of the page.
- The first release of the Mega Menu will only work on communication sites. Same with the new footer.
- Thanks for that input, it's possibly the best summary I have read in months. I'm very intrigued with your comment regarding no guests on communication sites. I haven't found this to be a problem, at least not yet anyway I'm able to add guest users via AAD and then provision access to those guest users within SharePoint. admittedly I haven't tried this on a communication site at a site level permission as yet, only granular access to lists and libraries on a communication site.
The omission of the Planner web part does strike me as odd, though the existing Planner web part is hyper tuned to the Groups experience. That's why it doesn't currently work with Comms sites, though I agree that (especially if the Plan is public) there should be the ability to add ANY Plan to the web part.
