Questions about new Communication Sites

[Brent Ellis]

Hopefully simple questions I cant find answers for on the videos/blogs:

Are communication sites limited to newly created sites?  

Can I apply the communication site pages to an existing publishing site or team site?

What happens if we have self-service site creation turned off?  Do admins have a way to manually create a communication site?

Is it possible to turn my top-level tenant SharePoint home page into a "communication site"?

[#2]

@Dave Cohen (US)

[#3]

following... this is the same question I've asked a few different times over the last year. Our root SPO site is a publishing site. Are we stuck with this?

[#4]

also... will the new Communication Site have multilanguage (variations like) capabilities?

[#5]

I had the same questions posted over at the blog post. I'll repost them here for better visibility.

- for departmental intranet solutions - do you recommend one big "communications sites" container with subsites (is this still possible?) - or many separated communications sites containers per department?

- What is happening to the default root site collection? Will I be able to turn this into a Communications Site? If not, it's a pity that the sweetest (shortest) URL cannot be properly modernized.

- what is the Events web part based on? Is this a new kind of list, can it pull from any list that has "title, start and end date" columns?

- are the SharePoint News comments based on Yammer conversations or something new and different?

[#6]

@Craig Debbo, there is nothgin to stop you from deleting the root site collection in SPO. I've been deleting the root site collection and recreating it as I sometimes want a publishing site and sometimes I don't.

I think that the geenral feeling of Intranet/Portal is something from the past. At least for now ;)

The way to access all the sites relevant to you can now be found in tools that you use all the time ( Teams, Outlook etc). Why would you still want to have a intranet home page that shows you news and old news that takes a lot of effort and only gives the impression that you're reading the same thing over and over again before you get to what you really need to find.

[#7]

@Pieter Veenstra, thanks for the reply. Yes I tend to think that your view is in line with the SP trend. That is, many team/group sites with a flat topology rather than a traditional tree of sites.

I can't easily remove our publishing site. Everything is underneath it... Guess I could plan to migrate content.

Some direction from Microsoft would be helpful.

[#8]

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@Pieter Veenstra wrote:

@Craig Debbo, there is nothgin to stop you from deleting the root site collection in SPO.

The way to access all the sites relevant to you can now be found in tools that you use all the time ( Teams, Outlook etc). Why would you still want to have a intranet home page that shows you news and old news that takes a lot of effort and only gives the impression that you're reading the same thing over and over again before you get to what you really need to find.

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This is what I've wondering after the #spsummit. "are we doing intranet wrong"? One big cointainer with multiple departmental subsites has "global navigation" going for it, while splitted site collections have easier creation and management speaking for them. 

[#9]

We have had a 'flat topology' model with different web applications (intranet, team, project, publishing, apps, mysite) since 2012 when we rolled out SP2010. I know many organisations regard their SharePoint environment as 'the intranet', and have placed 'team sites' under a tree structure under the top level 'intranet' site. We made a conscious decision to keep the intranet web application separate from the team/project web apps.

Our on-prem topology consists of 6 web applications, and varying numbers of site collections per web app; 1 for the intranet, around 180 team/project site collections (that use the same template), plus 32 publishing site collections. Team/project sites are limited to one sub-site level. Publishing sites can have more but must relate to the same top level subject matter - we use a lot of publishing sites to publish procedure manuals, for example.

For SPO, where we are restricted to /sites or /teams, all our existing top level team sites will be migrated to /teams. Some sub-sites may end up as Group-based sites because they are more closely aligned to DL structures. Publishing sites will become communication sites. We will continue to maintain a flat topology model.

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[#10]

Adding @Mark Kashman maybe to direct to some answers to these questions building up.

[#11]

I'm generally surprise about the low volume of user questions and product manager answers in this community for this event. Engagement was definitely different in the previous Yammer community.

[#12]

Microsoft's response is over on the blog now. Apparently the comments are something new:

News comments are not Yammer powered, but unique tech we have so we could have per item comments - so stored in the same site collection and mapped to the pages it's located on.

[#13]

Yep. 

Also it seems as Microsoft is building some kind of "content roll up Portal" (or something similiar) for Ignite 2017 - basically a site that is one level above team/comm sites.

[#14]

Will the Communication site be available as a site template in future, so that subsites can also be created with that?

[#15]

I'm expecting the subsides of commsites to just inherit the template, though I haven't got a confirmation on that yet.
Or do you mean as a subsite of an existing classic team site?

[#16]

Yes I think as a subsite of a classic team site

[#17]

looks like you cannot create communication sites as a subsite of any site, not even commsites itself, since the template is not available.

[#18]

Great post and I'm looking to do something to make better use of the /Teams and /Sites in SPO.  Team sites under Team and Comms Sites under /Sites ... sounds radical!

Do you know of any issues with doing this?

[#19]

All good questions, still relevant!

I am currently trying to duplicate a communication site and ran into trouble doing that...