Forum Discussion
SharePoint Online Intranet - A new approach? What are your thoughts?
I was debating all this myself internally and I assume Microsoft will make the following changes sometime next year:
- Add a "news headlines" element to the SharePoint Waffle Landing Page that aggregates all news pages from all the sites that you have access to or are following
- similiar to the News Tab in the iOS SharePoint App
- Introduce the modern Publishing Pages features.
- It'll be interesting to see how they enhance the current modern pages, since in theory (and pratically) you are already publishing (modern) pages and news
We'll probably go this route:
- reconfigure the current sharepoint root site collection to "modern", and find some appropriate name for it
- add modern subsites for departments and branches that host content that was previously shared in a dedicated Intranet. Stuff that one departments offers to all users or specific locked down document library for a subset of users
- separate subsites are needed in order for the SharePoint News features to show up as "from department XYZ". (Question: how do I prevent subsites from opening in another tab?)
- push this default root site collection to all users somehow
- Future Iteration: make the root site collection some how personalized instead of generic
- add modern subsites for departments and branches that host content that was previously shared in a dedicated Intranet. Stuff that one departments offers to all users or specific locked down document library for a subset of users
- O365 Groups (+Sites) for all other stuff (internal department stuff, projects, interest groups and so on ...)
- Custom Site Collections for future larger projects/apps and publish those as Waffle Icons in the O365 Launcher.
How do you want to create Modern subsites? They are not available yet? Or do you intent to wait untill they are available?
Mike Jansen wrote:How do you want to create Modern subsites? They are not available yet? Or do you intent to wait untill they are available?
Just create the subsite, go to Site Contents > Pages > Create Page (modern) > add News Headlines & Quick Activity Webpart manually > Set to Homepage > done.
I have a separate thread open for the root site collection regarding auto/default modern: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/Change-Root-Site-Collection-to-quot-modern-quot/m-p/31575#M2737
Ah, of course. Good workarond!
Another thing to get aroud: What solution would you use as people/colleague finder?
- The people app? But that one sends my users to Outlook so they might get lost
- Delve? By default it will send you to Delve-home, I would prefer Delve-Me. I can't find the direct link to that page.
Or, is there another option to use as people/colleague finder?
Only difference I've noticed between O365 Groups Sites home.aspx and my custom home.aspx is that my custom page shows the Page Title (H1) and the currently non-editable hero image behind the title, therefore all the other webparts start a little lower than in O365 groups sites, where no Home Title is shown and the News Headline Webparts start directly below the Toolbar.
I haven't figured a way around that yet.
As for people, I don't know yet, depends on what you want to achieve.
- if you just want to get to the Delve Profile of specifc person, users could pick any route, because the new people sidepane that opens when you click a persons name anywhere in O365 shows a direct profile link under the 3 dots (...)
- if you want a people directory in a tabular view the best you can do out of the box is go the People tile, and open the "Directory" part. Though it lacks a lot of features like additional columns, proper search, grouping and sorting.
- back when I've used SharePoint 2013 onPrem we've created a custom contact list, that updated all fields with a SharePoint Workflow from the linked users profile.
- I don't quite understand why Microsoft is not offering a OOTB solution for this request