Introducing the new SharePoint start experience

Is there a way to turn off users creating personal pages? 

Please listen to us and depreciate this feature.  Just have the SharePoint link point to the root intranet site.  Most organisations don't trust most users to create sites and pages and most users don't and never will ever need the ability to.  For those that do we provide appropriate training and even then push them through appropriate approval processes to ensure its been done properly.

Please see my feedback below from looking at the new feature rollout. Note that these are my personal insights only but feel they would relate to most of your customers.

What I do like:

I like that you can see pages you have recently worked on (draft and published). If this was the only thing additional you added to the Start page that would have been great.

What I don't like:

I don't like (or understand at all) the Page creation feature from the Start Page. See my reasons below:

• If you want to create a Page that will ultimately be published into a SharePoint site, you should go to the SharePoint site and create the page (simple). I've never heard of anyone saying this is an issue, and we are a company of 65k users with more than 100k SharePoint sites.
• For new Pages, you already have Create as a private draft in SharePoint and can share it with others - so why try to recreate this feature somewhere else?
• 
• If someone creates pages in their OneDrive and they then go on extended leave or leave the company - we have an issue. The pages are not assessable by others or lost completely.
• As part of our company's overall content policy, anything specific to our company that is intended for wider use (including SharePoint Pages) should not be created in OneDrive, so this new feature completely goes against our company policy.
• If users publish a page in their OneDrive, there is no way to then get it into the SharePoint site, so they will need to start the page from scratch causing a lot of frustration and wasted time.
• Many of our SharePoint sites have custom (including mandatory) metadata on their Page Libraries that needs to be filled in prior to the page being published. I don't see how this new feature can handle that which is an issue.
• A lot of our sites have custom page templates that they should be using for those sites - no option to use them here.
• Our SharePoint sites use various themes (colors), so when we create our pages in SharePoint, we immediately see exactly what the page would look like in that site (with the site theme). I can't see how this new feature can handle that.
• Bug: When you save as draft in OneDrive then publish to SharePoint, the folder created in the Site Assets > Site Pages library is just a guid, not the name of the page as it should be. This makes it difficult to see what folder relates to what page, especially if you have lots of pages. When you save in draft or publish to OneDrive you get the folder with the Page name as it should be in SharePoint. An example of what you get in SharePoint: "/sites/NAME_OF_SITE/SiteAssets/SitePages/24c8acf3-dffd-4370-9a6c-d812de4e3ad4/NAME_OF_IMAGE.png".
• Limitation: There is no way via the UI in OneDrive to find the Site Pages or Site Assets libraries, and no way to find the pages you have saved, so not sure why we would publish to OneDrive.
• Unsure: What happens if I set one of my OneDrive pages as the home page (Make homepage in the Site Pages library)?

I'm really not sure what the intent or purpose is to have personal pages saved in OneDrive at all. Is this part of a wider initiative/strategy that we (your customers) are not aware of?

Also, it says this is still in preview, but it's live in our environment which is set to Standard Release. My understanding is that we shouldn't see preview features unless something has changed recently. We need to ensure that anything rolled out to our environment is fully tested and ready for full production rollout.

What we would like (need) is a way to turn off the entire Start Page Page Creation feature and just have the list of pages you have recently worked on. Really hoping that this is possible - especially since it now breaches our overall content policy.

EDIT: Just noticed that we also get the Create new site button even though we have hidden the Site creation option. And when clicking on the button we just get a blank window which isn't great at all. This highlights the reason why we shouldn't be seeing Preview features in our tenant.

BellePodeanu Thanks for your reply. Just wanted to confirm what we will get if Microsoft disable it in our tenant. Will it just function as it did before the rollout? You mentioned we can restrict out tenant from receiving the new SP start, but we already have it in our tenant. I'll be logging a MS Support ticket tomorrow for this and provide feedback here on the outcome.

Also, for additional feedback - Microsoft need to start rolling out these new features off by default and provide a way for your customers to evaluate and turn on when ready. Especially since a lot of them go against many customers' governance and policies, and since most of the stuff Microsoft are rolling out these days are definitely not even close to production ready. This has been the same feedback for years from your customers, but still get almost every new feature turned on by default, and often no way to turn it off until months later when your customers ask for it.

If we have self-service site creation turned off what will the user experience look like? Will they see a button and get an error, or not see a button?

I agree with DaveGerrard. Just have the SharePoint link point to the root intranet site. Most organisations don't trust most users to create sites and pages and most users don't and never will ever need the ability to.  For those that do we provide appropriate training and even then push them through appropriate approval processes to ensure its been done properly. The preview as it is looks like, sorry to say, a waste of investment. Unless there's a greater plan involved.

Most users are not bothered or even have the option to create pages or sites and don't want to either. In my eyes, the current - but rather useless - start experience is even better than the now in preview one. Most important functionality given by the new start experience is also accessible by the SharePoint app bar ('Create' tab). If you really want to make it a somewhat useful experience at least try to make it a more extensive SharePoint app bar create lookalike.

Best solution however would be if you'd make it a setting to forward the SharePoint-text to the home (root intranet) site.

Tested it, seems if you have self service turned off then you get the Create Site button but it just pops up a blank window show here. 

Better than it allowing them to bypass I guess. But def. not ideal UX. 

In addition to my previous post: I did a screenshare with one of our users today and when they clicked on the Create new site button in the Pages section of the SharePoint Start Page they were taken through the wizard and were able to create a new SharePoint site. Below is a screenshot of what we have set in the Site creation settings to ensure the Create new site option doesn't show to users - this now bypasses that. We have a custom app that users need to go to in order to create a SharePoint site so we can ensure they have at least 2 owners, classification, business unit, reason for the site, etc. which is a key part of our overall SharePoint Governance. As mentioned before, this is a Preview feature that is now in our Standard Release production tenant and absolutely not ready for production use. We need a way to completely disable the new Pages section where you can create Sites and Pages.

Note that I've now submitted a UserVoice for this new feature, so others are able to see the current issues, and hopefully get a quick turnaround on being able to completely disable the new Start Experience Site/Page creation feature. Very concerning that you replied to my previous post that On/Off switch for page creation is only on your Mid Term roadmap - it needs to be available (to completely turn off) as a matter of utmost urgency. Also, still trying to get a response as to why we are seeing Preview features in our Standard Release tenant.

Disable new SharePoint Pages feature from SharePoint Start Experience (M365 Roadmap ID:124824) · Community (microsoft.com)

Just watched the video and I don't think this is "really really really coooool" new exciting feature....

We use SharePoint as a staff intranet, a key source of knowledge and news for staff, and train our authors and content owners in how to produce and manage content.

Now with this new feature it seems we will have any staff member creating random pages and their own SharePoint sites?

I want our staff to know which site is the trusted, managed, accurate, curated source of truth - not bounce around between new personal sites and pages appearing in their search results.

Can we disable new site creation for users from the SharePoint start page? 

Who is providing all the feedback you referred to in this video?  It sounds like these are features everyone's been wanting forever - and yet despite delivering thousands of SharePoint sites we didn't see any opportunity to provide feedback?  I think the strategy these days is to "do", then ask for feedback.