From the course: Sharepoint Online Essential Training: Beyond the Basics

SharePoint Online sites: The basics

From the course: Sharepoint Online Essential Training: Beyond the Basics

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SharePoint Online sites: The basics

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Well, SharePoint Online has been around for a while. There was a major overhaul of SharePoint done a few years ago, and the result is what is called the modern SharePoint experience or the modern experience. In the modern experience, there are three types of SharePoint sites: Team sites, communication sites, and hub sites. Team sites are meant for collaboration. This is where a group of people who are working on the same project or the same types of work work together with data, files, documents, and so on. Whenever you create a team site, SharePoint automatically creates a related Microsoft 365 group for you, and your site will come pre-equipped with a newsfeed and with various apps like a document library, a calendar, an activity list, and so on. Communication sites, on the other hand, are meant for information sharing rather than collaboration. For example, a communication site might be created by your sales team to share an overview of your activities with the entire organization. When you create a communication site, you do not automatically generate a Microsoft 365 group. Both team sites and communication sites are created from SharePoint home. Right here. If you choose Create Site, you'll have the choice to create a team site or communication site. Here's an example of a team site. We have navigation on the left. We have news at the top. If we scroll down, we'll see on the right, a document library. If I look at a communication site, it's a very different look. For example, here's a sales showcase. Notice how visually appealing this site is. In a communication site, I have an information and image-rich homepage, and while it has a document library right here, that library is typically used to support the images and content that we see here on the page. We also have links where you can learn about sites, learn about the content, and so on. Hub sites are used to connect other sites. They can provide some common branding and navigation. So we have a hub and we link to it. We will learn more about hub sites later in the course. But hub sites also allow you to aggregate news and activities from all of the associated sites, or search those associated sites from a central hub. Hub sites have to be created by SharePoint or Microsoft 365 administrators. They require a high level of permission because they are critical components for SharePoint's infrastructure and organization. Your organization SharePoint might have a fourth type of a site. It's called a classic team site. These are team sites that were created with SharePoint Online before 2018, before communication sites, before hub sites even existed. Or they might have been created after 2018, but they're created using legacy templates, the original templates that came with SharePoint Online. If your organization has used SharePoint Online for a while, you probably have some classic sites kicking around in your SharePoint collection. These sites will look a lot like the modern sites, because their document libraries and lists were all updated automatically to match the document libraries and lists in that modern SharePoint experience. However, there are some differences between the classic sites and the new modern team, communication, and hub sites, and I'll mention those when it's relevant to the work that we're doing together. In this course, we're going to focus on creating and customizing modern SharePoint sites, team sites, communication sites, and hub sites.

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