The Modern Site Conundrum

What type of site should I be creating in Office 365?  Until a few years ago it was simple, you would create a sub-site within an existing Site Collection.  This “Classic” Site model is something SharePoint Folk have been working with for years and are comfortable with.

Microsoft then decided to tear up the rule book with Modern Sites attached to Office 365 Groups.  Not only was the new style Team Site in fact a Site Collection, you also got all this extra functionality like Planner, Notebook and Exchange Calendar.

Rather than simplify the situation Microsoft announced in July that they will be rolling out the ability to create Modern sites without creating a Office 365 Group.  As part of this update they also announced the option to stop users creating sub-sites.

Confusion

Our non-scientific survey via Twitter seems to suggest that organisations are divided over which type of sites to create.  This is reflected in the conversations we are having daily with our customers.

The simple truth is that there is no single right answer to what type of sites to create in Office 365.  It will very much depend on where your organisation is in its SharePoint journey and whether services like Teams/Groups will be well adopted.

You also do not need to follow a single path with the types of sites being created.  There is nothing wrong with having leveraging Classic sites whilst starting small scale pilots of Microsoft Teams.

How can ProvisionPoint 365 help?

What we found interesting about our survey was that no one responding was using Modern sites without Groups.  Possibly because they did not know this option is available.  We think more organisations will adopt this approach as they migrate from Classic sites and do not see a role for Groups/Teams.

At ProvisionPoint we like to provide our customers with options.  We already support creation of Modern site Collections without Groups and we continue to support the creation of Modern sites with Groups.  If you are not quite ready for the “Modern” experience, we still support creating Classic sites and Site Collections.

Interested in learning more or seeing a demo of ProvisionPoint 365? Contact us to learn more.