Office 365 – SharePoint – Team Site or Team Site – SharePoint Online Configuration

In the good old days of SharePoint 2007 site templates were the common way to deploy your intranet solutions. And even if you didn’t use farm solution to provision your site you could still create new site collections using the out of the box site templates.

With Office 365 the option to create site collections with a template still exists. The available templates however has changed a bit.

There are 3 categories that the templates have been divided into:

• Collaboration
• Enterprise
• Publishing

This article will go through the two team site templates that I found in Office 365.

Collaboration

In the Collaboration section you will find templates that are typically used as a base template for sub sites in intranet. These templates are also made available for site collection creation for people who like to create multiple site collections for different teams, projects.

Team Site

The team site is probably the most commonly used template.

Enterprise

Within the Enterprise section you find templates that can be used for Enterprise wide solutions such as Record Center, Search Center, etc.

Team Site – SharePoint Online Configuration

Ok so what is this. A second Team site template. I’m confused. Why does this exist under the Enterprise Category?

And the result of the site seems to be the same as the traditional team site. Ok, template have a deeper look at these templates. I’ve exported the sites using the PnP PowerShell commands and I found some differences.

In the SPO version of the team template I found:

<pnp:AdditionalMembers>
<pnp:User Name=”c:0-.f|rolemanager|spo-grid-all-users/0fd838b5-bfbc-4450-858a-0cdf258197d3″ />
</pnp:AdditionalMembers>
<pnp:Permissions>
<pnp:RoleDefinitions>
<pnp:RoleDefinition Name=”Create new subsites” Description=”Can create new subsites”>
<pnp:Permissions>
<pnp:Permission>EmptyMask</pnp:Permission>
<pnp:Permission>ManageSubwebs</pnp:Permission>
</pnp:Permissions>
</pnp:RoleDefinition>
</pnp:RoleDefinitions>
</pnp:Permissions>

<pnp:Features>
<pnp:SiteFeatures>
<pnp:Feature ID=”d28bf940-11d3-496c-a9b9-22f60076a879″ />
<pnp:Feature ID=”69cadbef-ac7d-494d-9d0a-39a26e008377″ />
<pnp:Feature ID=”5d86fce4-1d23-11df-85a4-a17a56d89593″ />
</pnp:SiteFeatures>
<pnp:WebFeatures>
<pnp:Feature ID=”0935173a-0ba1-4f08-ae07-447d6d3f7d92″ />
<pnp:Feature ID=”357dbc59-3a16-4d39-91a7-caf1ee8a542f” />
</pnp:WebFeatures>
</pnp:Features>

Ok so now I know what to look for.

• An additional user “rolemanager”.
• Permission role definition “Create new subsites”
• Some features that have been activated

rolemanager

Within People and Groups I found a user:

So what is this user used for? The name seems to give the clue away

Everyone except external users

As the on-premises version of SharePoint doesn’t work the same way with external users as SharePoint Online does. An additional user account is used for this.

Create new subsites

An additional permission level “Create new subsites” permission level:

Features

So we have 3 site features activated:

<pnp:Feature ID=”d28bf940-11d3-496c-a9b9-22f60076a879″ />
<pnp:Feature ID=”69cadbef-ac7d-494d-9d0a-39a26e008377″ />
<pnp:Feature ID=”5d86fce4-1d23-11df-85a4-a17a56d89593″ />

and 2 web features:
<pnp:Feature ID=”0935173a-0ba1-4f08-ae07-447d6d3f7d92″ />
<pnp:Feature ID=”357dbc59-3a16-4d39-91a7-caf1ee8a542f” />

I had to google/bing for these features:

d28bf940-11d3-496c-a9b9-22f60076a879 – Office 365 P1 only HelpCollectionLite Feature

69cadbef-ac7d-494d-9d0a-39a26e008377 – Office 365 only BPOSExtranetFlag Feature

5d86fce4-1d23-11df-85a4-a17a56d89593 – Office 365 only

When I looked for the guids for the web features I wasn’t able to find them in google/bing:

0935173a-0ba1-4f08-ae07-447d6d3f7d92

357dbc59-3a16-4d39-91a7-caf1ee8a542f

Both these features seem to be hidden features.

Conclusion

Both templates seem to be quite similar with the Team Site – SharePoint Online Configuration being a more SharePoint Online specific version. So we should probably start to use this template when using Office 365