ROLLING OUT: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups & Pages

Microsoft

Today marks the beginning of bringing the full power of SharePoint to Office 365 Groups, with additional benefits to SharePoint Online all up! New and existing groups will get modern team sites, which come with an updated Home page, the ability to pin items within the new Quick links web part, and to see what's going on in the site via the new Activity web part. 

 

These team sites within Office 365 Groups, and existing team sites throughout SharePoint Online, will also have the ability to create publishing pages - fast, easy to author pages that support rich multimedia content, and look great on mobile browsers and via the SharePoint mobile app. Get ready to communicate and share your ideas within SharePoint like never before.

 

Additionally, Microsoft will increase the site collection limit in SharePoint Online to "up to 25TB" (previously "up to 1TB); this will be refelcted in an update to the official "SharePoint Online boundaries and limits" support article.

 

Please review the associated blog on blogs.office.com, "New capabilities in SharePoint Online team sites including integration with Office 365 Groups" with numerous links to new and updated support.office.com articles.

 

SharePoint_ModernTeamSite-Home_MAIN.png

 

Let us know what you think,

Mark

207 Replies

@Alyssa Danesh wrote:

Hi Philine - 

 

More layouts to come! The single column layout is just the first one out the door. Multicolumn layouts are absolutely a feature we are actively working on.

 

Thank you for your feedback regarding the spacing around the site header/placeholder image and nav. Smiley Happy 


Hallelujah, just got my first chance to play with these new modern pages, and this is the first thing that I noticed.   

 

We've used the Bootstrap responsive layouts in SharePoint Online for years with great success, so for our organization, going back to a big fat single column would be hard to stomach.

 

I also hate the giant banner.  Between the O365 Header, the Site Header, and the Banner,  MOST screens wont allow you to see content at all on page load.

The reality is that giving us Sharepoint framework access in production tenants would pretty much take of the rest of my complaints as I could do the rest of it myself then.  I know better than to expect that right away but it's a nice dream, isn't it?  Please Microsoft..... let us at it!  So many web parts are just sitting in my dev tenant waiting to see the light of day...

Sometimes I think they stick in the occasional unpopular but easily fixable feature or element in just to give the nit-pickers something to focus on.

 

Not that I'd ever do such a thing, of course Smiley Wink

Or they do that so they can later fix it to draw attention away from the other features they're still working on....  that said I'm pretty happy with the new modern areas and the progress.  

My client was complaining about this also. Have you found an answer?
It has been 1 month, how is the rollout progressing?

G'day @Dean Gross, I have not heard or seen anything about the ability to either remove this or even change it? Looping in @Mark Kashman

Nope.  However if you really need to I have found that in sharepoint designer you can just copy the system generated home.aspx of a group/site.  System pages don't have the banner.

 

Also trying to edit the .aspx page in designer gives access denied but it looks like the differnce might be

 

<mso:PageLayoutType msdt:dt="string">Home</mso:PageLayoutType>

vs

 

<mso:PageLayoutType msdt:dt="string">Article</mso:PageLayoutType>

Probably best not to mess with it though as there may by unintened consequences.

Hi Dean,

I think the rollout ring expaned last week or this weekend, because today I've noticed the "Site" Link in the Groups UI, though without the Modern Pages I think the new Home Page looks a little out of place and empty :)
I've noticed the following things:
- Opening the Group Site for the first time (or following times - depending) from the Outlook on the web UI navigates you to the Groups Documents folder, instead of the home page. Not sure if this is because of the missing modern pages in my tenant.
- when you hover of the new "Home" navigation button you see the following link https://<tenantname>.sharepoint.com/sites/<groupname>/_layouts/15/groupstatus.aspx?target=home
I think the "target" variable changes the "homepage destination" for the above mentioned "Site" link in the Groups UI. After opening the new "Home.aspx" the target changes to this page instead of the document library.
- you get a new "News.aspx" in the Pages library, but it's as empty as my home.aspx, though interestingly the modified date of the home.aspx is unchanged (some date in May 2016)

Looks like I'll have to wait for the 2nd part of the "modern" rollout (=pages) to get the full experience.

cheers!
Just got the modern pages as well. Groups Homepage automatically gets Quick Links and Activity Webparts.
For existing SharePoint Teams Sties you'd have to create a new page add those 2 webparts manually.
I also see the sites link from within the groups page but it kicks me back to the documents page and there is no link to any other page. If I delete everything after the site path, it still sends me back to the documents page anyways. Is this normal for others as well?
Also, does anybody know if this will also include auto creation of a group when a new team site is created?
I'm also sent to the documents page when I first clicked Site. But I have a "Home" link in the left quick navigation. After clicking this Home once, the "Site" link changes from documents to the home.aspx for me and my groups.

Yes - this is the intended behavior.

is this target variable saved group wide or locally on each client?

Group wide.  Note that new groups will have this set by default.

I've created multiple test groups today and all new groups defaulted to the documents library at first.

Could we have an update please with regards to when we should expect to see the new home page for Office 365 Groups and the new Modern Team sites.  Currently on my tennant with users added to First Release this is missing in action.  I replied to the tweet here from Sharepoint, https://twitter.com/SharePoint/status/786589823389818881 indicating that all First Release customers should now have team site integration - this certainly is not the case for me. Our tennant is hosted in Europe.

 

Cheers

 

Janson

Same for us. We're not seeing modern Group pages yet (at least not by default) and our entire tenant is on First Release.

I am in the same boat as you! Need a way to update the page banner and ability to remove the page banner if not required. I am assuming this feature will be rolled out with Modern Publishing Pages. Tiles view of site pages looks very bland!!

 

Appreciate if anyone from Microsoft can respond to this.