Forum Discussion
SharePoint Beginner Questions
Thanks Dean,
Yup - As a beginner I find SharePoint's interface quite challenging at the moment but I am willing to learn.
I would like to set it up right from the start though to avoid manual changes in the future.
Do you have any info/links/documents on where I can read up on or do research on the PnP you are referring to?
Thanks for the advice.
Y
In addition to the links already provided, https://dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices is a good place to start.
Since you are just getting started with SP, i would recommend going slowly. As you are discovering, there are a lot of options. Some are better than others, and the first way you learn how to do something may not be the best in the long term.
Ask specific questions in this forum, there are many people in here with years of experience.
Instead of trying to learn all of the features, try to solve a specific business problem and just learn the features that are needed to solve that problem.
While SP has been around for many years, it is changing quickly and lots of info you may find on the internet is out of date, this community is a great place to get the up-to-date info.
Thanks Dean.
I agree.
Maybe you can give me some advice on what I am trying to start off in SharePoint and ask specific questions like you mentioned.
Objectives:
*Entire team to upload various documents to SharePoint which are accessible for internal and external resources.
*Create a site per project and make use of webparts to display documents according to metadata "tags". For example: Per department or per subcontractor,etc.
Current challenges/thoughts/brainstorm ideas:
*I have 96 projects for which I need a site each
*I would like to have a site template with the logic built in so that I do not need to go and add mulitple webparts 96 x times and everytime I get a new project, if it makes sense. But as you said ~ working with a template is not such a great idea...My end goal is to use the same site structure for mulitple projects in the most efficient way?
*I downloaded SharePoint Designer but get this error message if I want to create a new site: See image uploaded. Any advice on how to solve this?
Next steps in mind:
*Starting off with a mock sharepoint site for the team to use and explore.
*Build the site from there? But still not sure how I will then duplicate it for future projects and how adjustable it will be for changes as the sharepoint portal improves and advances.
That's all.
If this is not the right forum to ask these types of questions please provide me with links to the appropriate forum(s). As I mentioned ~ I am new to all of this. :)
Thanks for the advice thus far.
Y
I would recommend that you spend the time to learn and implement the PnP Partner Pack see the video at https://dev.office.com/blogs/introduction-to-pnp-partner-pack-v2 to get started and then go to https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP-Partner-Pack for the details. This will provide you the ability to create and deploy the site templates in the most effective manner.
PS, when you have a new questions, start new conversations so that they get seen.
We have been using SharePoint (2010 - 2013 - now Online) since early 2012 and have maintained the view ever since to stick to the 'out of the box' look and feel. The more you customise and modify, the more complex it gets to upgrade (or won't upgrade).
For SP 2010/2013 we had several web applications for our farm - teams, projects, intranet, publication (and some more but those were the main ones). Teams and Project sites used the same OOTB template, the intranet and publication sites had publishing features enabled.
For SPO we will use Office 365 Groups-based (team) sites for all new projects, with the prefix 'PRJ' in front of the Group name to indicate that it is a project. (Archived projects will be migrated directly to /teams/ name path with PRJ as a prefix to the name).
All of our 100 or so project sites have the same template, but site owners can modify them, within some limits. Not all of our project teams wanted the same layout - we tried that a few years ago and found that we kept having to modify the 'default' template all the time. It was much easier from an admin point of view to let them modify the template as they needed (with guidance as required).
Not sure if you are using SP on-prem or SP online but if you are using on-prem keep in mind that modern pages in SP online have different web parts OOTB. We have asked all our site owners to minimise page-based content because of this change, so we will be able to migrate it.
