Plan and structure your SharePoint Online Team Site

SharePoint Online, which is available as part of Microsoft Office 365, helps businesses create sites to share documents and insights with colleagues, partners, and customers. Team Sites, a feature of SharePoint Online, allow your organization, team, or group to connect with one another and collaborate on documents, post announcements, schedule meetings, maintain tasks, track issues or action items, store information in lists, and so on.

To maximize the effectiveness of Team Sites, it's helpful to develop and follow a plan for how you'll build and organize the site. The following questions, taken from Step 2 of Microsoft's four part "Getting Started with SharePoint Online series," will help with your planning:

• Question 1: What kinds of sites do you need? Depending on the size of your organization and the volume of content that you plan to have on your Team Site, you may want to create sub-sites under your Team Site to organize content. The image below shows how this might look.
• Question 2: What kind of content will you have on sites? The goal for this content planning is to determine: What kinds of content types you might want to create; what kinds of metadata (site columns) you want to associate with these content types; and what kinds of lists or libraries you need to organize content.
• Question 3: How will your users find and access content? Consider how site users will find and use the content on your sites and it will help you make decisions about how to configure both navigation and search for the Team Site and its subsites.
• Question 4: What do users need to do with content? Incorporate specific questions about content use scenarios into the content planning process and it will help determine how to configure specific sites, lists, or libraries, and what specific features site users may need to use in conjunction with content.

Whether you're a site collection administrator, a site owner, or someone who is otherwise responsible for planning sites, these questions and the accompanying article will guide you through some of the key considerations involved in planning the structure and content for your sites.

Learn more about SharePoint Online for professionals and small businesses here.

How did you plan your Team Site? Share your story in the comment section below.

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--Stephen Bury

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