SharePoint is a website tool that was created by Microsoft for the main purposes of document management and collaboration. It's mostly used as an intranet content management system for organizations, but it can also be used as an external facing website accessible from the internet. So let's talk a little bit about some SharePoint history. SharePoint actually goes all the way back to 2001 with an original on-prem version that created something called classic template. So classic templates were great because they offered a variety of functionality,.
But they were really labor-intensive and really bulky to maintain. So in 2013, Microsoft migrated to an online or cloud version to make the configuration and maintenance much easier. And it took that a few steps farther in a few years. And in 2019, they actually updated their templates with a more modern look and feel known today as modern sites. So what is a modern site? So a modern site is a template configuration and there are three main templates in the modern sites set up there's team sites, collaboration.
Sites, and publishing sites. So a modern site is basically just a pre-configured template for a website that structures only the most relevant features that you need in that configuration. Now, that being said, SharePoint is a fully customizable tool and you can add on to each one of those standard templates to make sure that your website has all the functionality it needs. All right. So what are we going to cover in this course? First off, we're going to talk about the SharePoint site structure. So SharePoint is not just a single page website. There's actually a hierarchy, uh, from a site collection all the.
Way down to sub sites and assets. So we'll talk about how that set up behind the scenes so that you understand exactly how the structure is put to. And then we'll talk about SharePoint apps. You can plug and play and add in applications into your website template that you select to make adding in features very easy. And we'll walk through how to work that process. We'll talk about site permissions and SharePoint offers a variety of permissions for both content and sharing. And we'll talk about each of those setups and how to set them up.
In your site or site collection, where would you navigation? So we'll talk about how to navigate through a SharePoint site and what to look for aware so you can understand how to make sure you can see all of the information that's available in your website. We'll talk about site apps in the content area. So this is a little bit different than SharePoint apps, and it's a lower level of content that is embedded or plugged into a specific page. And it shows and allows for a different area of features and there's different types of content that you can see in a specific page as content area, as opposed to an actual application that's linked into the site itself..
We'll talk about integrating with office 365. One thing that Microsoft does very well is talk to other Microsoft products. So we'll talk about how to access Microsoft applications within SharePoint and how to access SharePoint from other Microsoft applications. We'll review collaborating with SharePoint. SharePoint has a variety of collaboration features to enable discussions with in the website itself. So we'll show you how to put those pieces together and enable collaboration on your sites to keep your communication active. We'll discuss version management..
So this pertains to maintaining the integrity and your documentation. So as you add assets to your website, you're adding documents in your document library, and you're updating lists. There is a way that you can see an audit trail on who made what change when, and we'll show you how to see that process so that you can make sure your content is always relevant and acquire the information you need of who made what change. We'll talk about customizing views. So anyone who has any experience with working in spreadsheets tables, things like that, views it very important to make sure that the information that your.
Users are seeing makes sense to them and is visually appealing and only shows the relevant content that they need. So we'll walk through that process and then we'll talk about SharePoint pages. So there's a variety of things that you can do with a page. You can add content, you can change the UI, you can customize the features quite a few different ways. So we'll walk through all of the areas that you can customize in a SharePoint page and what each part pertains to and the type of information it holds. Okay. That's our course content in a nutshell. So let's get to it and let's get learning..
Okay. So let's talk about the SharePoint site structure and hierarchy. So SharePoint at its highest level is actually a site collection. Okay. So if you work for a larger organization and you log in to their SharePoint site, you are more than likely starting at the very top, which is the collection of sites for your organization, that houses a homepage. That's going to be your landing page, obviously. And then underneath there are going to be sub-sites pages in libraries..
So let's talk through this. So up top here at the very top, this is SharePoint instance, office 365. And what this means is obviously to access SharePoint, you have to have a Microsoft subscription there's licensing. And once you acquire your license with Microsoft, they set up an office 365 instance for you, which is where they build your SharePoint site. So at the very top of the organization, you have the top internet site that is the highest node in your site collection..
Now, from that top level node, you're going to get into your sub sites that are different areas of the organization.
So in this example, we're using departments as sub-sites in this structure from the site collection. So here's my company site up here. Here's my finance department. Sub-site here and here's my operations department sub-site over here. Okay. And depending on the permissions that you give your users that you allow to access your intranet site, they'll either be able to access the finance or the operation..Sub-sites. Now, as we keep going down through the hierarchy, we see the assets that are connected to each of the sub sites. So in this example, finance has two pages. They have a page for accounts payable information. They have a page for accounts receivable information, and they have a library for all of their contracts. And the operation sub-site has a page for their order management department. Okay. Now the people who access their operations sub-site have access to the order.
Management pages and the people who can access their finance sub-site have access to their accounts, payable, their accounts receivable and their contracts library. Now you may have some roles and some people who want to access both the finance and operations, sub-sites, that's fine. When you set up your permissions, you make sure you make a group or a level to enable access to the specific sub-sites underneath from the site collection so that everybody has the rights that they need to access the sub-sites that pertain to them..
Now, additionally, you can also take your permissions to the next level. Maybe you want some folks in your finance department to just access accounts payable or just access accounts receivable, or just access one of these pages and the library. You can set that level of configurations in your permission to. All right. So I hope this gave you a good idea on how the structure works behind SharePoint and this lesson we covered what the structure is like under the covers or behind the pages. And you understand the basic navigation, concepts and hierarchy from a site collection all the way through to sub sites, pages, and libraries..
In our next lesson, we'll talk through how to access a site so that you can get into a SharePoint site and start looking into how to navigate around. Thanks very much for listening to this lesson, I'll meet you in the next one and let's keep learning. Okay. So before we dive into SharePoint, let's make sure you have access to a site. Now, if you work for company and your organization has a site that you can access, that's fantastic. Go ahead and use that. If you don't, we can actually install a sample site from Microsoft fairly quickly, and you can use this as your sample to follow along through in this course..
So here's what you can do navigate to this site. And you'll find this link in the descriptions below docs, microsoft.com SharePoint, add a sample site. And from this page, all you need to do is scroll down to the get started section and then click on SharePoint, lookbook. And then from here, you're going to go into see example. And then on this page, select the team option and look at these templates. We're only going to cover team modern sites in this course, we're going to be using that template as our example..
So I'm using this one. I'm I downloaded this one over here. This is a template that I'm going to use. If you want pick the same one, click that template in the next page. It's going to ask you to add it to your tenant. So like we talked about before, on the introduction. If you're doing this, you need to have a Microsoft subscription, you need to have a license, and that will give you a tenant that they can build your instance from. So if you click on this button, you're going to get to another page. They're going to ask you to verify a few specifics about your account and your.
Tenant say yes, and then they will create the site for you behind the scenes. The whole process takes about five minutes. You'll get an email when your site is complete. So if you're following through with this, go through those steps, wait for your email, pause. This course, then come back and we'll do. Hey everyone. And welcome back to SharePoint fundamentals in this chapter. What we're going to learn is just basic navigation in a SharePoint site..
Okay. So we're going to start at the highest level of site. What you're looking at right now is the site collections home page from my SharePoint site collection. We'll start here. We'll talk about how to navigate around these global navigation options, and then we'll dive into getting deeper into the actual sites itself. Okay. So it's fairly straightforward once you're at your landing page or your homepage for your site collection, you're going to see the same basic navigation bar up top for all of your SharePoint sites. So let's just talk about this from left to, right. Okay. So starting over here on the left, just like all Microsoft applications, you.
Have your application launcher now, depending on the subscription that you have with Microsoft, you'll see the available applications that you have,
And you can also get into more detail for the office 365 applications from here. All right. You'll also see some ability to stock cements that you've had access to in the past. And if you click on more dogs, that'll expand that list. Like all SharePoint sites and like all Microsoft sites, you have the global search bar in the center of the navigation. So if you click in here, enter your search options, you'll be able to find anything that you need within, within the collection that you have.Over here on the right-hand side, starting off in the far corner, you have your account profile details. So if you click in here, you'll see details about your account profile and additional navigation links, where you can get into additional profile settings and make any updates. If you have two next to that, you have your help icon, which brings you to support. And depending on your questions that you ask, it'll navigate you into specific areas, the little gear icon that's next to that is the settings. So if you go into that, you'll see some specific settings for your SharePoint collection and your SharePoint sites..
We'll be diving into this much deeper in future chapters. And then over here, basically what you have is just some next steps or some ideas that SharePoint can give you to improve your site based on the standard template that you select. No worked on the left-hand side. You have your global navigation bar for SharePoint. The top icon over here is your home page. So when you click on this, you're going to automatically get to where we currently are for the home page. That gives you a more detailed layout for your site collection. Okay. So you can see right..
When I clicked on that, I got into the layouts and this shows me some high-level defaults that I have for navigating into my SharePoint collection. We'll talk through these in a second. The next icon down here is my sites icon. So if you click in here, you'll get into some more details on the sites that you have access to. It'll show you in a list, view what you frequent and then what you are currently following. We'll talk about following sites in a later chapter, over here in my news, it's going to give you a list of news, depending on the subscriptions or the access that you have to your site collection..
It'll give you some specifics from those sites to give you some high-level news notifications. And then over here and in my files is access to your one drive. Okay? So everything's connected in Microsoft, like we said, it's all on the cloud. Your subscription is all integrated together. So here you have a list of some recent files that you've accessed from your one drive location. So it's another shortcut to get to some additional information in your. No over here in this default template, the way that this is set up, and this can also be customized. You have a different view of some of the same information that.
You have over here on the left. So here's the news from the sites that also over here on the left-hand side, here's the sites that you frequent. And then over here on the central left little bit to the right of the navigation bar you have in here who you're following, what your reasons are and what your featured links are. So at a high level, it does give you just some different views of the same information. But the intent here is to have very easy access to all the information in your site collection. Okay. All right. So in this chapter we covered basic navigations at a very high level..
And the next chapter, we're going to dive in a little bit deeper. We're going to talk about something called a quick launch bar, which is more detailed navigation from the actual site itself when you dig in there and then we'll explore on how to upgrade that information and navigate in your specific SharePoint site. All right. So thanks for listening in this chapter and I'll see you in the next one. Welcome back everyone. Okay. So we've learned how to access a site and how to navigate around the top level site collection. Let's actually dig into the sites themselves a little bit more and learn how to navigate there..
So I'm starting off in the same place where I was in the last chapter. I met my highest level landing page in my SharePoint collection. And what we're going to do is actually dig into some specific sites. So before we get into that, I want to just recap some. Details that we talked about in the summary section of this course where modern sites in SharePoint are really mainly just. Site template collections. And I'm going to show you an example of that here. Now, if you walk through the setup process with me and you created your own teams site from the SharePoint examples, you're going to have a card here under.
Frequent sites that says communications. Now, this is actually a really good example, because if you remember in the summary chapter, what we talked about was modern sites have three different types of templates. They have team sites, communication sites and publishing sites. And again, a template is just a predefined configuration of a site to kind of help you get started. Now, this team site that we created is actually titled communications to make it even more clear, right? But this is actually a very good example because even though this team site is.
Titled communications, you click into it. Obviously you get into the website, it is still a team site. And when that just means is that there's different options that are predefined to allow you to navigate easily in your site. So in this default template, that's a team site, title communications that Microsoft provided for us over here on the left-hand side, we have something called a quick launch bar, and we'll get into that in just a second. Over here in the center, you have your same default for communication news. So this gives you your current information. That's in your site, Dan her in the bottom. We have two other web parts..
We'll talk about this in more detail in later chapters also, but at a high level, just so you know, your pages are broken out into actual parts where you can define the information that's shown in that panel. Okay. So this part is document list here. This is actually your document library for this. And then over here, we have the activity that's been happening in this site. So this gives you a list of the latest information on things that have been happening. So as you can see here, Christina Tedesco has access quite a bit.
Of information in this site. Here's exactly what happened over here. On the right-hand side, you have some more news. You have a resources panel over here, and then you have some specific team locations information on here to give you some logistics as to the members or the resources that are in your teams. If you scroll down, you have some more setups here to give you additional information. All of this information is fully customized. All right now because I'm the owner or I'm the admin of this, and we'll get into permissions in the next chapter. I see some options up here, right? So I can click in here really easily..
And I can do some things on my site. I can make a new page. I can discard my changes. I can get into some page details and I can look at some analytics. We'll talk about that in later chapters as well. But you also see over here on the right hand side, some edit options. And if I'm in the middle of making some changes, which it appears to be on this page, I'll have the occupants to republish my changes to get the latest content online as soon as possible. Now, what I want to focus on here though is just this quick launch navigation bar over here on the left, because it looks different depending on the template that you chose. Okay?.
So when this team site over here called communications, I had this quick launch bar over here on the left. That gives me really easy access to all the places in my website. This is my homepage. I can click into my notebook. I can go into my team calendar. I can go into my documents. I can share. I can look on my team's channel. If I'm integrated with teams, which I can be by default in Microsoft, I can go to one node. I have really quick, easy access to all of the areas that are in this actual. If I click on the edit button here, it also allows me to update this information fairly easily so I can do a variety of things..
I can move the list of links that are in here so I can change this order. I can move documents up here. If I like that better, I can move it under notebook. I can move it back to where I liked it. If I don't like those changes, I can make this order be whatever I want it to be. And if you have Ron here, you can see here very easily. You can add only girl able to navigation. If I want to add something, I click on that. I type in my URL. I give it a display name and boom, just like that. I have an additional link.
On my navigation. All right. And then there's that. So you have a few options here to customize this out of the box. You also have an additional option down here to enable site navigation for audience targeting. And this just gives some promotion or some more easy availability to site content to the specific audience that you have for your site. Okay. So you're going to save that. That'll save all your changes. I, you see here, your new link that's on here. So this is fairly easy and straightforward to update..
Now, if I'm in a communication site, I have those same options. It just looks different. So I also have a communication site, and again, this is not the team side template. This is a communications template, and you can see right off the bat how different this looks, right. I have different options over here. Actually I have the same options. They just look different and they're in a different order. So I have my published in my edit links over here on the right hand side, these are the same links that are on the team site. They just look a little bit different and they're in a different place. If I scroll down here, I have different default settings to these web parts in my communication site..
Okay. So I have some event information over here in this panel. I do still have a documents library list over here and that panel by growed down here, my news is all the way down here. Right? This is different in the team site. It was all the way up here. So it's set up differently. I have over here, some host information. And if I scroll down, you can see that there's different web parts that were set up in these areas for this page. And that's really basically the difference between communication sites and teams sites. It's how it's set up and the accessibility. Now also, you're going to see here too. This is your quick launch bar..
Okay. So this is a lot more condensed than what we had in the teams site. The team site had a lot more of internal defaults that you can get to very easy. And what I want to do is I want to open up this in another tab so that I can show you fairly quickly back and forth what the differences are, because I think that's going to be useful. So when here in my communication site, I only have these three default settings for my quick launch bar. And this is my quick launch bar. So if I go in here and I edit, I have the same options here that I have in my team site. I can still make all these changes and the edit panel will still come up over here on the left-hand side..
So you can see all that when you're done. The actual bar itself sits up here on top. And you can see there's only a few options here, as opposed to the team site that had all of these options here. Cause the team site is built for more internal collaboration, right? So I have a team that's set up in a lot of different areas outside of SharePoint and the idea of what SharePoint is to make it easy to access all that information that the entire team has. So I can get to the calendar I can get to the notebook I can get to the team documents were over here. It was just the communication site..
There's not as much internal interaction that I'm really requesting off the bat. I'm just sharing information. That's the idea of the communication site. So that's just what your links up here are more condensed. They're basic. Again, if you dig in there, you can see that there's more additional detail down here, but they're not as internally interactive in setting that direction as it is on the actual team sites themselves. All right. So how'd that make sense? This gives you a good idea on the differences between at least two of the modern site templates that SharePoint offers the communication site and the team site and the intention behind those templates..
Now just like the team site, this is fully customizable. We can make this look and feel however we want to. It's just set up differently depending on the target audience that your intent is when you build that. Okay. So we covered a lot in this chapter. We covered at a high level what this quick launch bar does, how it looks in between these two different templates. What I want to get into next is some permissions and user roles and share with you some specifics on depending on the role that you select for the users that you pick to access to your site, what kind of information they'll be able to see and how deep they'll be able to get into that information in your site. So thank you very much for listening to this chapter and I.
Will meet you in the next one. Welcome back, everyone. All right. Let's start talking about site permissions and permission levels and the type of access that you can give to your audience. So I'm in my communications site here, and you'll see over here on the upper right hand side, you have the setting icons we talked about earlier. If you click in there, you're going to see where you can set your site permissions. So if you go in there, just click on site permissions, you're going to see the options that you have. Now, what we're going to cover here are two different areas..
First area. And we're going to talk about is the type of access or the level of access that you can give your members that you add onto this site and the walls we'll look into sharing, and we'll see how you can let your members share the information on your site and who can do that. So let's talk about individual individual member access first. So you have three levels. Out of the box. You have site owners that have full control, and that's going to be your site administration, your site administer, or the person who actually created the site. Okay..
You have your site members who have limited control, so you can allow them to come in the site and make some changes in the site, but you can't give them are, they don't have some of the additional administrative functions that the site requires only the person who has full control has those. Or you have site visitors who have no control. No, basically that means these people can just come in and they can read your information, but they can't make any changes to it. Okay. So let's add a user to this site. Okay..
So I have the administrator all set up and I want to add a member actually to my site. So if I click on the share site link there, I can type in who I want to access. So I have my first user here that I want to access Chris TTO. I want to let this person have access to my site. Now, a little more behind the scenes here, your users that have the ability to access your site have to be set up in Microsoft's office 365 admin center. It's all connected through something called active directory. That's beyond the scope of this class, but the point to that is.
That in order for you to let a. Member access your intranet. They have to be a member of your organization. So they will need to be set up in another area before you can get them access to your SharePoint site. If you're not familiar with office 365 administration or active directory, contact your it admin for your organization, and they'll be able to fill those prerequisites for you, for your users, so that you can add them into the site. If you tried to add someone in who wasn't part of that organization or part of.
That list already set up, you would get an error message telling you you needed to do some additional administration before you can give them access. Okay. But anyway, moving on. So this person, Christina, I know she has access to my organization. Uh, she's a member of. I'm going to let her read this information. Optionally, you can send an email, you can click this or unclip this, and you can say, you know, please access my site, whatever you would like to here, give them a notification that they're going to be able to get into your site, gives you the site name appear, and they give you the domain that this is connected to..
So I'm going to say, add now you're going to, you can see here, right by default. It says read. Now I could change this here, but I'm going to, I'm going to change that in a screen to show you how it changes groups when you alter the access, but you have three default options. You have read, you have edit and you have full control depending on the level of access you want to give them. All right. So let's just add this person here. That looks cool. So I said read. So that means they come in here into the visitors category because the visitors are the folks who just read information and don't edit it. Now, if I wanted to change Chris, all right, you know what?.