A home site is usually a SharePoint communication site that acts as the face of your organization’s intranet. The home site surfaces news, conversations, pages, and discussions important to employees. The home site is a must if you are planning to have the Viva Connections experience in Microsoft Teams.
In this chapter, you will understand the key concepts to plan, build, and launch a home site; understand the home site’s “super powers”; explore SharePoint templates for the home site; and learn best practices for building a home site.
After the Viva Connections app is deployed, your SharePoint home site will become a default landing experience in Microsoft Teams. However, if people open Microsoft Teams without going to Viva Connections, they will see chats, teams, or files rather than the home site.
Plan for the Home Site
A SharePoint home site is a primary prerequisite for setting up Viva Connections. It provides a landing experience for employees to reflect on the organization’s brand, values, and culture. A home site can have global navigation, which helps to present important links to employees.
Surfacing attractive and dynamic content published for the enterprise from SharePoint
Helping to engage with communities from Yammer and spark conversations
Surfacing videos from Stream to communicate with colleagues through videos
A home page of SharePoint with the following sections, SharePoint app bar, Local portal navigation, featured news, conversations, videos, helpful resources, static links and my news.
The home page of a SharePoint home site
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SharePoint app bar: Shows global navigation, My Sites, My News, My Files, and My Lists
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Local portal navigation: Shows top navigation for the home site with links to important resources
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Featured News: Image gallery of featured news articles of an organization
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Conversations: Embedded Yammer conversations
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Videos: Shows recommended videos from Stream
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Helpful resources: Dynamic web part showing useful information
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Static links: Static links to useful resources
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My News: Dynamic personal news feed
The home site is not a type of site like a team site or communication site in SharePoint. Rather, any communication site can be designated as a home site in SharePoint.
If your organization does not have a home site, plan it first by creating a new communication site or choosing an existing communication site to be a home site.
From the SharePoint Admin Center, set the communication site as a home site for your organization.
The home site should be accessible to everyone in your organization.
Setting up a home site requires everyone’s involvement from stakeholders to employees. The following are a few points to consider for designing a better home site.
Stakeholder Engagement
Since the home site is a gateway to your organization’s intranet, it is important to prioritize the content and resources that are relevant to employees. It is critical to get aligned with your business and stakeholders to decide the content to prioritize. Meet with stakeholders to plan what content to surface. Decide what content to highlight, where to place the content, etc.
Enable Engaging Employee Experience
The home site should be employee-centric . It is a place for everyone in the organization to stay up-to-date with the information. Global navigation should be planned for better user engagement. Define a consistent look and feel on the home site by applying the organization-specific theme, logo, etc.
Plan for Navigation
The important content should be available easily to everyone, instead of searching for it. Not all the content can be placed on the home site or is relevant on the home site but is still important. The navigation should enable everyone to browse important content in the organization. Plan for better navigation with hub sites or global navigation.
Personalize the Content
As you can have only one home site per tenant, use audience targeting on the content including news, global navigation links, and web parts to target the relevant content to the users.
Define Microsoft 365 groups or email-enabled security groups to target the content to a specific set of users. Consider using dynamic membership groups to be compliant with the organization’s Joiner, Mover, and Leaver (JML) process.
Monitor the Performance
The SharePoint home site is one of the heavily trafficked sites in an organization. Always make sure the home page is healthy and performant.
Home Site Superpowers
When you designate a communication site as a home site in SharePoint, it gets some superpowers to make an engaging SharePoint landing experience.
Official Source of News
The home site is the official source of information for news and updates to the employees. News posts created from the home site are considered as official organizational news and always take precedence on the home site and SharePoint start page.
A SharePoint start page with tabs on the right, namely, Following and Recent. On top of the main tab is a search bar, and news from sites appears on the middle.
SharePoint start page
A communication site set as the home site automatically becomes an organization news site by default. We will explore more about setting up an organization news site in Chapter 7.
Home Site Features
With a home site set up , an organization can benefit from the following features.
Search Content Across an Intranet
From the home site, employees can search for content including news, sites, people, and files across the intranet.
A SharePoint home site search page of Nachan365 with a list of suggested queries.
SharePoint home site search
Global Navigation
Global navigation helps to define useful links to employees that will be available to them throughout all the SharePoint sites they navigate. Organizations can benefit from this feature to highlight important resources to their employees.
SharePoint App Bar
The app bar is a sidebar available in the left navigation on all SharePoint sites . It features global navigation. It provides a personalized experience for the users by displaying My Sites, My News, My Files, and My Lists.
We will explore more about global navigation and the app bar in Chapter 5.
Build the Home Site
After adequate planning and agreement with all stakeholders on what content to surface and where to place it on the home site, it is now time to involve technical experts to create a site in SharePoint and turn that into a home site.
The home site is a prerequisite for Viva Connections.
The home site should be a modern communication site.
It can be created via the SharePoint Admin Center or PowerShell.
The SharePoint administrator or Global administrator can provision a home site.
There can be only one home site per tenant, as of this writing.
It generally takes 10 to 15 minutes for the home site to take effect.
Set Up a SharePoint Site
The first step is to create a SharePoint site for your employee engagement . The SharePoint tenant comes with a default site called a root site. There is a subtle difference between the root site and the home site. We will explore it a bit later.
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Open the SharePoint Admin Center.
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Under Sites, click Active Sites.
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Click Create.
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Choose a Communication site.
A SharePoint admin center page represents on how to create a communication and team site.
Creating a SharePoint communication site
Apply a Site Template
Once a site is provisioned, click Settings ➤ Apply a site template. You can choose the Microsoft-provided templates as a starting point to design your site or you can choose the one from your organization, which your developers have designed for your organization using site scripts and site designs.
A Select a template dialog box with two categories, namely, From Microsoft and From your organization. The tab from your organization is selected, and two options labeled Contoso Site Design, and Contoso Site Design are present.
Choosing a site template
SharePoint Lookbook
A SharePoint lookbook ( https://lookbook.microsoft.com ) is a set of SharePoint templates provided by Microsoft that help you to quickly create nice-looking sites in minutes. You can simply choose and install a template in your SharePoint tenant to get started.
A landing page template with labels that read, Microsoft 365, SharePoint look book, View the designs, and Download look book PDF, and personalized contents, namely, site features, web parts used, content included.
The Landing template
It is important to note that the SharePoint lookbook provides you with templates that are responsive and customized for a specific scenario. It includes the site features, web parts, and content, including sample modern pages, news articles, custom welcome page structure, images, and office documents.
Set the Site as the Home Site
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Open the SharePoint Admin Center.
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From the left menu, click Settings.
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Click Home site.
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Specify the site URL.
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Click Save.
A settings page of SharePoint admin center with the U R L link onto the right side with a Save button at the bottom.
Setting the home site in the SharePoint Admin Center
PowerShell
If you are an administrator, you can follow the PowerShell approach as follows:
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Download and install the latest version of SharePoint Online Management Shell.
- 2.Open PowerShell with administrator privileges and log in to SharePoint Online using the following cmdlet:Connect-SPOService -Url https://<domain>-admin.sharepoint.com
- 3.Set a home site using the following cmdlet:Set-SPOHomeSite -HomeSiteUrl <siteUrl>
Permissions
At a minimum, a SharePoint administrator role is needed to create a site and set it as a home site.
Launch a Home Site
After you build a home site, the next phase is to launch the home site and monitor its performance.
Make a Home Site Available to Everyone
The home site is the landing experience for all employees. It should be available to everyone in the organization. Do not forget to share the site with everyone as a member or a visitor. With the member permission level, employees will be able to contribute content, whereas with the visitor permission level they have only a read-only view of the home site.
Monitor the Home Site Performance
The home site is one of the high-traffic sites in your organization. Therefore, it should be optimized for performance. The pages should be high-performing and responsive so that the content can be delivered faster to employees. Specifically, the home page of the home site should be high performing, since the home site is a gateway to your intranet, and it should handle traffic coming from Viva Connections app inside Microsoft Teams.
Page Diagnostics for SharePoint Tool
The Page Diagnostics for SharePoint tool is helpful to analyze the performance of modern and classic SharePoint pages. It is available as a browser extension in the Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome browsers.
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In the browser, find and install an extension named Page Diagnostics for SharePoint.
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Run the extension on the home page of the home site to measure the performance.
Measure Site Performance
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Open the SharePoint home site.
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From the Settings menu, click Site performance.
A site performance page with labels that reads, Page improvement opportunities, Could be improved, No action needed, and a bar meter with categories labeled Very unhealthy, unhealthy, moderately healthy, almost healthy, and healthy are present.
Site performance
The site performance page will display the page score in the range of Very unhealthy, Unhealthy, Moderately healthy, Almost healthy, and Healthy. The page will also suggest improvement opportunities.
It is important to work on the improvement opportunities and make your home page performant.
Enable Public CDN
It is recommended to enable a public CDN . The CDN hosts static assets such as images, style sheets, JavaScript files, etc. The CDN provides better performance on SharePoint pages by caching the static assets, which helps to reduce the latency.
Public CDN: Used for serving static assets like JS and CSS files
Private CDN: Used for serving images
Schedule the Site Launch
The site launch scheduler helps organizations to carry out a phased rollout in batches to target the users by defining waves. The launch of each wave provides the flexibility to gather user feedback and improve the user experience.
Prerequisites
Before launching the site scheduler tool, make use of site permissions (owner, member, and visitors) to add users to the site based on the function they will perform.
Prepare
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Open the SharePoint home site.
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From the Settings menu, click Schedule site launch.
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Review the site information.
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Make sure your home page is healthy.
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Click Next.
A window represents the steps to prepare site launch, which includes, prepare, details, waves, and summary with the page health score at the bottom of the screen.
Preparing site launch
Details
Less than 10,000 users: Two waves
10,000 to 30,000 users: Three waves
30,000 to 100,000 users: Five waves
More than 100,000 users: Five waves, but as mentioned creates a Microsoft support ticket to ensure the site’s launch goes smoothly
Specify the Type of Redirection
Send users to or from an existing SharePoint site: Users from the active wave will be redirected to the new modern SharePoint portal.
Send users to an autogenerated temporary page: Users from the pending waves will be redirected to the autogenerated temporary page.
Send users to an external page: Users will be navigated to an external URL until a wave is launched to users.
A window represents the experience to define the site launch, including launch information, expected users, redirects, and the site U R L.
Defining site launch
Waves
Based on your selection during preparation, you will see defined waves on this page. You can specify the schedule for each wave by adding 20 security groups per wave .
A window represents the experience to define the site launch, including launch information, expected users, redirects, and the site U R L.
Define waves
Summary
A window represents the site launch summary, including launch details separated by wave 1, and wave 2.
Site launch summary
Track the Home Site Usage
After launching the home site, keep tracking the site usage to analyze the user engagement and take the necessary actions to increase the engagement. Usage data is aggregated and displayed based on the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) . The calculation algorithm of page views is designed to filter out repetitive, continual operations by the same user on the same item, such as when a user repeatedly refreshes the page.
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Open the SharePoint home site.
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From the Settings menu, click Site contents.
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Click Site usage.
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The page will display the user engagement with the site.
A window represents the site usage analytics with overall traffics, average time spent, site visits, popular contents and insights.
Site usage analytics
Home Site vs. Root Site
You might hear a lot about terminologies being used on the SharePoint home site and root site. Let’s get into how these two terms are different.
Root Site
When you set up your Microsoft 365 tenant by specifying your domain name (e.g., Contoso), by default you will see a SharePoint site created at contoso.sharepoint.com. This site is your root site.
The root site is mandatory for each tenant, and it cannot be deleted. All Microsoft 365 tenants created after April 2019 have a modern communication site available as a root site. You can create additional sites under the /sites or /teams managed path.
Home Site
A SharePoint home site is a communication site that can be set as the landing experience of the SharePoint intranet. It provides an engaging experience for your employees by bringing together news, articles, and events relevant to them. As of today, you can designate only a single site as a home site. The root site can be a home site.
Best Practices for the Home Site
The home site should be inclusive of all audiences. Surface the content that makes your users feel more connected. This will help an organization achieve the main purpose of building a digital gateway to your organizational information.
It should be responsive and should be accessible on any device to create an engaging experience for both information workers and frontline workers.
As the home site is a gateway to your intranet, expect huge traffic on it. Continuously monitor and optimize the performance of the home site.
Plan your global navigation carefully, because it will showcase the links to important resources. This will help your users to navigate to content easily rather than searching for it.
Track the home site usage to see the user engagement.
Use all possible communication mediums (e.g., Yammer, Microsoft Teams, emailing the banners) to promote and spread the word about the home site.
Make sure the home site is accessible to every employee of your organization.
Try to have the root site as a home site to avoid any confusion among your users between the two.
Since the news published from the home site always takes precedence on the SharePoint home site and start page, that news should be relevant to the organization.
Set up the content approval flow to ensure verified and quality content will be published on the home site.
Conclusion
A home site is generally a SharePoint communication site that acts as the face of your organization’s intranet. We have briefed you on the key concepts to plan, build, and launch a home site; understand the home site superpowers; and explore the SharePoint templates for the home site.
In the next chapter, you will learn about the importance of app bar and global navigation.