Forum Discussion
Modern Team Sites vs. Communication Sites--is there really a difference?
- There are a few under the covers things that I have found are different (but those are minor so far).
The main things I've found are:
1) Comm Site default pages have a full width web part zone (modern team sites dont)
2) Comm Site uses left navigation on top and has no "top navigation"
3) Team sites have left navigation, if you want to hide them you have to do it with some CSS
Other than that, I've technically been able to make Team sites look and act like comm sites, in most respects with a little CSS hackery. Like Andrew mentioned though, we are completely rethinking how we have done everything because of the new modern world, and we are having to do ALOT of mini-migrations from one site to another to make things make the most sense.
The introduction of Communication sites, and the similar/identical options for pages, has made us re-think about how on-prem sites will be migrated to online sites.
- All of our existing team and project sites (created in separate /team and /project web applications in on-prem) are going to sites created in the SP Admin portal under /teams, with a very small amount becoming Group-based /teams sites (remember the setting can be changed between /teams and /sites). Project sites will have a PRJ naming prefix to differentiate them.
- Our existing publication sites except the intranet will migrate to either SP Admin-created /teams sites or SharePoint Portal created /sites Communication sites. We see no requirement yet to create publication sites from SP Admin. Communication sites seem best for relatively small communication-focussed content, whereas some of our larger publication sites lend themselves more to the SP Admin-created modern team sites.
- Our current intranet, a typical old-style information portal with organisational information, news, policies etc, may end up being split between a number of mostly Communication sites - for example, a dedicated site for policies, dedicated sites for organisational divisions using the 'showcase' template, news delivered in different ways (Yammer, site-based news, etc). What's driving a lot of this thought is mobile access.
The main point I'm making is that the new SP online environment providest the opportunity to re-think architecture and content layout - especially for mobile access.
AndrewWarland wrote:The main point I'm making is that the new SP online environment providest the opportunity to re-think architecture and content layout - especially for mobile access.
Great wrap-up, thanks. This kind of migration is a good point to sort things out and reorganize your content. But in so many cases you have people who actively prevent such thinking because "Everything has to stay as it is because the users are used to it in this way."...
- There are a few under the covers things that I have found are different (but those are minor so far).
The main things I've found are:
1) Comm Site default pages have a full width web part zone (modern team sites dont)
2) Comm Site uses left navigation on top and has no "top navigation"
3) Team sites have left navigation, if you want to hide them you have to do it with some CSS
Other than that, I've technically been able to make Team sites look and act like comm sites, in most respects with a little CSS hackery. Like Andrew mentioned though, we are completely rethinking how we have done everything because of the new modern world, and we are having to do ALOT of mini-migrations from one site to another to make things make the most sense.Brent is right here. Other than that haven't noticed any current differences, but I'm expecting a little more convergence or divergence in that regard, not sure which way Microsoft is leaning towards.
It was mentioned in the past, that a few additional rollup features, like corporate news are in the pipeline. They might be limited to Communication Sites.
Also I wish I could adopt the comm site template to an Office 365 Group, because sometimes we have the need to group a few people together, but only a small subset of users are really creators/contributors and the navigation options in commsites are just more user friendly if you create a lot of pages.
guess we'll see more at Ignite.
- Ivan you really highlight the typical communication type site pattern with a small group of specialised,write access editors/contributors and a much larger read-only audience who reads and participates. Each audience wants a very different experience and neither wants the powers or restrictions of the other. its a very common model in business for news, libraries, corporate knowledge etc.. We have in the past on-prem addressed this with cross-site publishing to give each audience a physically distinct UI experience over the same data and it will be interesting to see how SPO evolves to support this site pattern.
Thanks Brent Ellis. After reading your reply I checked to see if I could switch the quick launch nav to be the top nav by switching to the Oslo masterpage (as you can using the classic page experience) and this just switches you back to using a classic page as your home page. I guess I have alot to learn.... Do the Modern pages use master pages?
