Setting Up SharePoint Home Site

Introduction

SharePoint Home Site is a new feature available in modern SharePoint that allows you to define a given site as a Home Site for the whole SharePoint tenant.

Benefits of Home Site

Home sites are SharePoint communication sites that have special capabilities.

• Search for content across the entire intranet
• Official source of organizational news
• Enable and customize global navigation in the SharePoint app bar.
• Use Viva Connections to integrate your intranet into Microsoft Teams.

Steps

Step 1 - Create a communication site and apply a site template ( Applying template is optional, but as this is a new way so let's cover this )

Create a SharePoint communication site through the SharePoint admin center. In this case, I have created a communication site named “Home”.

After the site is created please apply a site template (earlier known as site design) provided by Microsoft. Navigate to the site setting and click on “Apply a site template”.

After clicking on that a window will pop up and you can choose any template from Microsoft/custom.

I have chosen the “Topic”, after selecting it to click on “Use Template.”

And then the site will be provisioned with the template.

Step 2 - Make this site a Home site using PowerShell.

We will use PnP.Powershell for this, if you have not installed the PnP.Powershell. Use this command to install it first,

Install-Module -Name PnP.PowerShell

Now Connect to the SharePoint site using this command,

Connect-PnPOnline -Url https://sp1226.sharepoint.com/sites/Home

Then it will prompt for user and password post that you will be connected.

Now Run the below command to set the home page.

Set-PnPHomeSite -HomeSiteUrl "https://sp1226.sharepoint.com/sites/Home"

Outcome

After your Home site is configured, you can observe the changes.

Enablement of Global Navigation link on Home site

This can be used to configure navigation on the AppBar of the SharePoint tenant.

Search Box on home site

Change in the search box as now it's searching from the whole tenant. By default, this searches from that particular site only.

News from the home site on SharePoint Start page

The news which is created on the Home site is getting highlighted differently as compared to the other site. There is a border around them as shown below: