Forum Discussion
Questions about new Communication Sites
following... this is the same question I've asked a few different times over the last year. Our root SPO site is a publishing site. Are we stuck with this?
Craig Debbo, there is nothgin to stop you from deleting the root site collection in SPO. I've been deleting the root site collection and recreating it as I sometimes want a publishing site and sometimes I don't.
I think that the geenral feeling of Intranet/Portal is something from the past. At least for now ;-)
The way to access all the sites relevant to you can now be found in tools that you use all the time ( Teams, Outlook etc). Why would you still want to have a intranet home page that shows you news and old news that takes a lot of effort and only gives the impression that you're reading the same thing over and over again before you get to what you really need to find.
Pieter Veenstra wrote:Craig Debbo, there is nothgin to stop you from deleting the root site collection in SPO.
The way to access all the sites relevant to you can now be found in tools that you use all the time ( Teams, Outlook etc). Why would you still want to have a intranet home page that shows you news and old news that takes a lot of effort and only gives the impression that you're reading the same thing over and over again before you get to what you really need to find.
This is what I've wondering after the #spsummit. "are we doing intranet wrong"? One big cointainer with multiple departmental subsites has "global navigation" going for it, while splitted site collections have easier creation and management speaking for them.
Pieter Veenstra, thanks for the reply. Yes I tend to think that your view is in line with the SP trend. That is, many team/group sites with a flat topology rather than a traditional tree of sites.
I can't easily remove our publishing site. Everything is underneath it... Guess I could plan to migrate content.
Some direction from Microsoft would be helpful.
We have had a 'flat topology' model with different web applications (intranet, team, project, publishing, apps, mysite) since 2012 when we rolled out SP2010. I know many organisations regard their SharePoint environment as 'the intranet', and have placed 'team sites' under a tree structure under the top level 'intranet' site. We made a conscious decision to keep the intranet web application separate from the team/project web apps.
Our on-prem topology consists of 6 web applications, and varying numbers of site collections per web app; 1 for the intranet, around 180 team/project site collections (that use the same template), plus 32 publishing site collections. Team/project sites are limited to one sub-site level. Publishing sites can have more but must relate to the same top level subject matter - we use a lot of publishing sites to publish procedure manuals, for example.
For SPO, where we are restricted to /sites or /teams, all our existing top level team sites will be migrated to /teams. Some sub-sites may end up as Group-based sites because they are more closely aligned to DL structures. Publishing sites will become communication sites. We will continue to maintain a flat topology model.
Great post and I'm looking to do something to make better use of the /Teams and /Sites in SPO. Team sites under Team and Comms Sites under /Sites ... sounds radical!
Do you know of any issues with doing this?
