Provisioning Teams and customizing SharePoint

Iron Contributor

We're preparing to roll out Teams to the whole organization and are looking into what is and isn't possible or recommended from Microsoft.

 

Specifically we want to know whether it is supported or even recommended to customize the SharePoint site that is rolled out along with Teams? We're afraid that if we start to make changes to the underlying SharePoint site, we'll run into problems later on if Microsoft wants to make more general changes.

 

We're not talking about huge changes as such. Mostly stuff such as removing items from the lefthand navigation, changing the logo, theme, etc.

 

We're an educational institution. One of the things that have given us pause is the way that Staff notebooks work. It seems to us like Staff notebooks behave differently whether we create a Team using the GUI, Powershell or from the admin center, which tells us that somehow they aren't created the same way and we thus run the risk of running into trouble long term if we don't choose the right approach...

 

As far as we can see these are some ways of doing it:

1. Roll out Teams, and then make changes to underlying SP site afterwards, using PowerShell, Graph, etc.

2. First roll out a modern SP site, customize using PowerShell, Graph, etc. and then add Teams

3. Create a premade template team. New teams created, are essentially copies of this template team.

 

Could someone help us provide guidance as to:

1. Is it supported to customize the underlying SharePoint site to teams, when provisioning in large scale?

2. Which way of provisioning, out of the mentioned ways, would be most optimal?

 

Thank you in advance!

 

PS. We've seen this great blog post, it just doesn't provide an "official" response to the question:

https://joannecklein.com/2019/07/16/auto-provisioning-sharepoint-sites-and-teams-a-blog-post-list/

3 Replies
Totally supported to customize the site linked to a Team in the way you have described
Yes! The only way you can make trouble is by doing permissions changes and/or messing with the default library

Thank you for the responses, much appreciated!

 

Have any of you seen the issues that I mentioned regarding the differences as to how the site OneNote notebook behaves in different scenarios?