FEATURE PREVIEW: modern team site creation experience for SharePoint Online

[Sean Squires]

Hi everyone! As we announced the other week and retweeted right before the holiday – we have started rolling out the new site creation experience to our First Release subscribers. If you are eagerly waiting for it to land in your tenant, you can now get an early preview by navigating directly to the new site creation form: simply append /_layouts/15/creategroup.aspx to your tenant URL.

Please note -  this link is only available to First Release customers - and it bypasses your admin settings for site creation; it is intended solely to provide an early preview as we roll out the feature. Once it is fully deployed we will be disabling this preview link. This preview only applies to the site creation form - not to other features (in-place navigation editing, site information, etc.) included in this release.

We hope this provides tenant admins with the opportunity to check out the experience prepare their users for this exciting feature update. Please let us know if you have any questions! Thanks!

@Mark Kashman, @Tejas Mehta

[#2]

:) We are smart people and we were aware of this workaround :p

[#3]

Ha, I should have figured! ...I didn't want you to think I hadn't shared though! Now that we're past the Thanksgiving holiday we'll be picking up the rollout to First Release subscribers in earnest. Thanks!

[#4]

Thanks for the info.

Note: that link to the new group creation wizard does work, even in tenants that previously disabled Groups creation using Exchange-oriented Powershell commands.

[#5]

Is there any reason why the "Create Site" button (on the SharePoint page in O365) should *not* be present in a recently-created E3 tenant on First Release? I seem to have a number of newer features but that create site button isn't present (and is not disabled in the SharePoint admin settings)

[#6]

Looks good, thanks for the link. It doesn't havethe option to give the group a classification. Is that coming or did I read somewhere we need to run a powershell script to enable that?

[#7]

Any plans to let us customize the metadata they need to provide when they create the sites?

[#8]

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/Site-classification-link-to-Office-365-information... Ian, I've recently discussed this in the above thread, looks like this might be early in 2017.

[#9]

Cheers John. Thanks for the heads up.

[#10]

@Kevin Crossman - thanks for reporting; that shouldn't be the case. This bypass form should still honor the AAD EnableUnifiedGroupCreation property setting (if set to false, the form will still come up, but the group won't get created). Can you confirm that you were able to create the group (and if so, had you also set the GroupCreationAllowedGroupId property and were a member of a permitted security group)? Thanks!

[#11]

@Kevin Crossman - no, E3 is supported...the only reasons why the create site button wouldn't show is - as you note - if the link is hidden in admin settings or you've disabled group creation via AAD property (and you've set the admin setting to create group - effectively putting you in "can't create" category). Did you verify the EnableUnifiedGroupCreation property value?

We aren't @ 100% of all FR subscribers yet (should be there by early next week). Are you still not seeing the link on this tenant? Thanks!

[#12]

Actually @Ian Walton and @John Wynne - the PowerShell commands to set those AAD properties should be available now. They are by default empty (so we won't display them in the form), but you can set following these instructions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-accessmanagement-groups-set....

And yes, the goal is to soon provide a UI for more easily setting/managing these site creation options. Thanks!

[#13]

We have Groups blocked using the original Exchange-based powershell command. Planner also currently bypasses this original setting. The presentation at Ignite made it clear you have to block groups in both places, but it's not a big deal for us because we're going to enable group creation in next month or so regardless.

[#14]

Thanks. The "Create site" button not being present is in my MVP tenant (kevdo.sharepoint.com) but maybe it's just not gotten pushed out yet?

[#15]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, we've tested to make sure once you use the admin controls managed path that we honor both settings (something I agree needs to be consistent across the suite). Glad to hear this isn't impacting, but I'll double-check w/ my dev to make sure we aren't inadvertently ignoring something in this test form.

[#16]

We're @ 100% FR-Users and 50% FR-Tenant as of Friday...if you're in the latter FR group and still not seeing it, you'll likely be in that last 50% rotation (scheduled for this week). Thanks.

[#17]

Great found it out by myself but thanks for telling :)

[#18]

Thanks.

Strange thing is that the "create site" feature isn't new -- it's been in SPO for many years (as a feature you an enable/disable for users). Seems strange that the button itself isn't present.

[#19]

Fair point - so you're saying that it was there and now it's not? Can you share your tenant settings (what track of First Release, the EnableUnifiedGroupCreation property value, and the admin control option in SharePoint tenant admin)? Thanks!

[#20]

This is my MVP tenant, created in last month. Has never had the "create site" on the SharePoint page in O365.

SP settings below.

Release Track: First release for everyone

Release track user: all