Editing your SharePoint Home Page
Preamble
Each Team in MS Teams has its own associated SharePoint site by default. You can tell it’s a Teams site by the Teams logo in the site header.
Your 'Team Site' serves as a workspace for the documents and functionalities which are utilised in a specific area of an organisation. There is a document library by default, a Notebook (OneNote), and Recycle bin, which are linked in the main navigation, which is customisable.
Other useful default features are links to the Pages within a site, and the Site contents, which serves almost like a root directory for the site. Other MS365 apps also use the Team site as a basis for access, (eg Forms, Lists, Planner), so you can make use of any of these apps and collaborate within your working team.
The Default Home Page
Settings Cog: This opens the top-level site settings menu. It gives basic options within a drop-down interface, but also links to more advanced settings in a less front-end interface (“old SharePoint”). Site owners will be able to drill down, but there are a few options for members of and visitors to a site.
SharePoint Navigation: These vertical icons move you around SharePoint as a whole. This includes all of the sites you have access to within the organisation. They are: Home (navigates to SharePoint start page), My sites, My news, My files, My lists, Create. These buttons open pop-outs in place of the the Site Navigation pane. This cannot be customised
Site Navigation: These default items are links to sections within and relating to this Team Site. As indicated by the Edit label at the bottom of the list, this is configurable.
News: This is used to make announcements. A News Page is a specific type of site page, which can be picked up by other elements (Web Parts) and can be presented in a number of different areas across SharePoint. This is not widely used in Physics at the moment. We recommend deleting this section (Web Part) if it’s not in regular use.
Activity: This shows items that have been recently edited by people in the Team. It will only show users items to which they have access. Eg. if there was a ‘Management’ document library with exclusive permissions for Team Owners only, these documents won’t be visible to Team Members.
Quick Links: A handy feature which allows for links or buttons to be added. These are customisable to a limited extent within the context of the Theme of the site (colour scheme). We recommend this for shortcuts to frequently used
Documents Page: This is simply a preview of the folder structure within the main document library. You can open documents from here, but this suffers from a very limited context menu (traditional ‘right-click’ options).
Site Navigation
Basic Settings
Site Navigation can be customised under Settings Cog > Change the look > Navigation.
For demonstration, we will use the default vertical approach.
Editing Site Navigation
Editing the Site Navigation is a helpful way of optimising the way your team uses their site as well as other Microsoft
Default items
Home: Links back to the Team Site homepage
Conversations: Simply links to Outlook. Not sure why this is a default feature?!
Documents: Links to the default Document Library where files are stored. This view is much more helpful than the above Document Pane as it makes available all the features of SharePoint document management. From here, you can also open additional Document Libraries, which are the best way to customise permissions for making documents available both within your Team and across the University.
Notebook: This takes you away to a Team OneNote file
Pages: This navigates to the Pages directory. This appears to actually be a special List which manages the different pages (presumably as SharePoint specific web-page files). This view of pages is largely unhelpful as it is a 'big-bucket' approach, and if your site is page-heavy, it would be best to build links to related content into your pages individually.
Site Contents: Takes you to the top level list of content. Think of this as the SharePoint equivalent of File Explorer!