SharePoint Site Creation Using Office 365 With Customized Home Page

What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform integrated with Microsoft Office for file sharing and storage. In other words, it's a document and content management system for project management with a team sharing feature. This platform provides the organization a means to coordinate and communicate with the team by creating a task, scheduling, and sharing any details related to the project.   

Credit: Microsoft SharePoint

The main features of SharePoint,

• Collaboration
  Help different teams working on “Same Project“ to collaborate using the same platform application; a team can customize their application or build their own.
  
  
• Interoperability
  It allows Office and web-based documents to integrate; custom building allows solutions using different technologies.
  
  
• Extensibility
  Application can be deployed on premise or to the cloud. For cloud, you just need to subscribe to Office 365 and you can get the advantage for this feture.

SharePoint also come with on Premise or cloud solution.

• On Premise versions - SharePoint 2001, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019

We will defiantly find some of the IT Companies still using early versions such as 2001 and 2003.  After this many years, technology evolves with SharePoint also.

Requirement for on premise has also increased with newer versions for small and medium firms who want to create SharePoint sites to collaborate with their different teams and different projects on the same platform using SharePoint Office 365.

Here are the steps to create your own SharePoint Site using Office 365.

To start with, we need to create access to SharePoint. We will use Office 365 trial to create our own SharePoint Site.

I am using Office 365 E5. Google the same and you will find something like this. Select the Microsoft portal to register.

Next, we will be creating a login. You need to fill in all the details and you need to provide your mobile number to receive security code.

This is how your first page looks like when you login the first time.

From the admin center in the left side below corner, you will find access to SharePoint and other applications.

Once you click on SharePoint, you should see the SharePoint site as shown below. The below screen concludes that you have access to SharePoint.

Next step will be to Create SharePoint Collection. Website is already created when a SharePoint service is used in Azure.

To create Site Collection, go to SharePoint admin and Create” Private Site Collection” as per the below figure.

While creating a new site collection you need to fill in the details marked in  yellow as per your site name. You also need to set Time Zone and need to add site admin.

This is how the page looks.

Credit: https://pietersveenstra.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/newsitecollection.png

Once you click on the create Site collection you will find a new link to add to your admin page.

Now you can browse using that URL. Your site page looks something like the below figure,

If you found any error loading the page or accessing the error you can check the permissions using manage Administrators.

To edit your main page you will find a setting on the right upper corner which gives you access to edit Page option.

You can change left side links and main page content by this tool.

By changing my page this how the new page looks,

By using the same setting you can add multiple pages to your site.

Selecting page name,

Enter some content for this page and click on save as shown in the below figure.

Once the page is created, copy the URL. 

Add a link on the left menu and enter the copied URL of the SharePoint page

Give the Display Name for the link select Ok and save.

So we had a site with a customized home page and left menu customized with needed links.

Your site is ready; now you can make changes and start using that as per your requirement.

I hope this article will help to save some valuable time while setting up. 

Thank you for reading.