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.
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."...
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.
- actually those small writers / large readers concept works just fine with just communication sites, but it's sometimes missing all the other Group Workloads. I sometimes would like to email all those users easily, but can't, as commsites don't have a mailbox.
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?
