Forum Discussion
Save Modern Team Site as a template & provision using Classic Team Site method (visible in SP Admin)
MicrosoftJust to be clear. Using save-site-as-a-template with modern team sites or publishing sites is NOT supported. You can always find aways with tenant admin permissions to achieve things, but the fact that it's doable does not mean it's supported.
Any sites created with the template which has been produced with this method can have unexpected issues in the future, so provided steps should never be used.
Best regards,
Vesa Juvonen, Senior Program Manager, SharePoint Engineering, Microsoft.
What is the correct, support way to create Site templates? I have many sites (all the same layout) that will need building very soon. As it stands I will have to create every single site by hand? Very inefficient. To read that 'Save as Template' was once a thing but now unavailable and unsupported sounds crazy to me. Especially when a lot of emphasis is being put on Power Automate, and business automation.
- VesaJuvonen
As mentioned in this thread - classic "Save site as as template" which was introduced back in 2008 will not work for modern sites. This is by design. You can however use for example PnP PowerShell to export and import sites with the tenant template capability, which also look book site at httts://lookbook.microsoft.com is using.
If you need to replicate similar sites, using PowerShell is definitely the most efficient way to do that.
Thank you. I am new to the MS eco system. So powershell is also very new to me. Is there any documentation I can follow to achieve this?
And do you know if it is possible to then use Power Automate to automate the creation of a Team site using the template? and then create the MS Team from this? As we constantly have projects going live, all with the same template. To Be able to automate this process is another step in allowing the company to scale.
Many thanks
Can you propose an alternative way on how to use created team sites as a template (e.g. for project management this would be really helpfull). If you could just add a new predefined project team site (e.g. with lists of risks, issues etc) whenever you have a new project.
Thanks for the answer.
VesaJuvonen Would you by any chance know if it will become possible (and supported) to create your own site collection templates and use them when creating a new site collection - SharePoint Online only?
I have googled around and I am not really able to find a solution. I am not a developer, and even though I can create and use PowerShell scripts, I would rather be able to use an "old fashion" UI :-) like the "save site as template".
Or do you know for sure that using a custom template for site collection creation will never really be an option?
Thanks in advance :-)
"You can always find ways with tenant admin permissions to achieve things, but the fact that it's doable does not mean it's supported."
Indeed. So much so that even Microsoft support tell you you can do things that aren't supported.
What does it say about a product and its vendor that such a statement is so proudly and positively announced?
"Our product so lacks integrity that you can configure it in ways that appear perfectly legitimate, but does in fact mean that the system state integrity is broken and deployment corrupted."
An accounting package which allows you to make transactions where the debits don't equal the credits. A nuclear power-station where a sequence of button presses leads to meltdown, and the support team tells you "If you can do it through the UI or PowerShell, it's ok".
Once all the re-writes of the dysfunctional SharePoint slap-on services have been completed as new products outside of SP, with their own MS development teams with some actual staff and some sort of future ...
SP Workflow -> Flow
IP Forms, Access Services -> PowerApps
Task Lists -> Planner
Lists, Columns, Metadata -> Common Data Service
BCS -> Connections, Data Sources, Data Management Gateway
Search -> Delve
SP Social -> Teams
... could Microsoft please ditch what remains, that is: a third rate cloud-based file system dogpile called SharePoint / OneDrive, and buy Dropbox and integrate it in?
