Communication Site Overview In SharePoint Online - Part One

Introduction

Microsoft recently provided a huge update for SharePoint online customers to view the SharePoint sites in different level User Interfaces. This site template is named “Communication Site.”

Now how can you  get the “Update” in your tenant?

Navigate to http://portal.office365.com

Open Admin Center ->Settings -> Organization Profile

Release preferences -> Click Edit ->Select “First release for eveyone”



Click Next -> Click Save

Just wait for a couple of hours and the update has been applied to your Sharepoint tenant.

Now let’s check communication site template in your sharepoint tenant

Open Admin center -> Click sharepoint



On that page click Create Site



You are now able to see the two site templates: one will be Team site, and another one is Communication site

Communication site

Communication site template provides a beautiful look and feel of Sharepoint sites across all the devices like mobile, web, tablets, and Sharepoint mobile applications.

It’s showing three types of design layouts

• Topic -> Contains News, Events, Documents and other webparts as team sites
• Showcase -> It helps to display the photos and images well suitable for products related sites
• Blank -> It’s a blank site template, we need to integrate all the webparts and layouts from the scratch

Now let’s create all the three templates and see the experience of beautiful communication sites

Click Communication site -> Choose Topic design template-> Provide the site title and Description -> Click Finish



Site has been created successfully



Here we discuss about

• Navigation
• News webpart and its layouts
• Page layouts with Mobile and desktop views
• People Picker Card Webpart

Let’s Get started with navigation

You are now able to organize you site navigation on the page using “Edit” link

Now I will show you how to create a link and sub link





Click Edit -> Click on the child navigation -> Click Make Sub link ->Click Save

Now the “Document” link has been moved as sub link “Home”

Create a New Menu Item -> Click on ADD Icon



Click Ok



“Our tenant” Menu item has been added successfully

News Webpart (This new News web part provides the rich UI experience for display and reading news)

Click Edit Page -> Click Add in a Page



Select News Webpart from Add web part selection window





When you click on EDIT

You can see the three types of layouts

• Top Story [View the content and images as a thumbnail widget]
• List View [This layout shows one by one ]
• Side by Side [It shows the content and images side by side]

Just Add going to news content into this News webpart

Click Add

It navigates to content page -> Provide the title of your News page



Click ADD Icon -> Click Image

Click Upload

Add Text Into it



You can also now adjust the font settings

Click Save and Publish

Top story layout



List View Layout



Side By Side Layout



People Profiles

This webpart helps to show the people card in your sharepoint page

Click Add -> Select People






Provide the People name and Press Enter it added automatically





Click on the profile -> It will pop up the user information like phone, email and recent activities of the user



Page Layouts

• One Columns - Seperated grid into one single portion
• Two Columns - Seperated grid into two portions
• Three Columns – Seperated grid into three portions
• One Third – left column- separate grid into one thirds, adjust left column
• One Third – Right column - separate grid into one thirds,  adjust right column

Now you can select your column grids on the go and there's  no need to write even a single line of code. It works well across all the devices.

Let’s check the one column layout



Desktop

Mobile



Two columns





Desktop



Mobile



You can also change the background image of the title section



Three Column Layout

Added Iframe Webpart into the third column

Desktop



Mobile



One Third – left column



Desktop





Mobile



One Third – Right column



Desktop



Mobile



/* End of Page Layouts */

Conclusion

I will discuss the other components in communication site template  on my second article, which will be coming soon

Happy sharepointing!..