Managing the self-service creation of the SharePoint site is one of the key elements in Office 365 Governance Plan. Planning the way to manage SharePoint site creation could give you a lot of freedom, but also possibly big challenges.
Get through available options and decide which model will be the best for you and your organization.
The choice between freedom and control?
The asked question could appear as the main decision-making aspect of this Governance aspect but in my opinion, it is not true. The main question you should rise when you doing this decision is:
How fast you want to deliver solutions to your business?
Firstly I want to encourage you to work on a basic Governance Plan and based on it to build the plan for using SharePoint in the way that improves the usage of SharePoint on the business user side.
Of course in both scenarios, you need to manage this process and review it. Validation of the content quality needs to take place. Otherwise, after some time your SharePoint environment will start to be messy and lose main value it has to the business: SharePoint as an always updates source of the information.
When you planning to manage the creation of the SharePoint sites you have two ways to manage it:
Sites created by the product owner
How the site creation process looks like:
- sites can be created only by SharePoint product owner (IT team, nominated business user etc.)
- users cannot create the sites by themselves
- creation of the site have to be requested
In this process, you as a product owner gather all the necessary information at the very beginning of the process. Business users after request have to wait for the site creation. Product owner has to manage all requests.
In that scenario information about created sites, like:
- site owner
- assigned users
- business case behind the request
- usage of the site
starting to be outdated quite quickly. To maintain them you need to implement a Governance Plan that will contain recurring actions that will update the necessary information.
One of the most key values of using SharePoint is really short time to market delivery. In my opinion in this model you delay delivery time for your business which could dicourage your users from using SharePoint. I strongly recommend to consider more flexible solution.
Of cource you can met situations where corporate policy requires such model, but maybe it is good time to start discussion about it 🙂 ?
Sites created by business users
How the site creation process looks like in self-service model:
- Every user can create the site for his team almost immediately
In this process, every user can rapidly create a collaboration space for his/her team on SharePoint. This will effectively increase the number of SharePoint site and usage of that product. I believe it should be one of our main goals 🙂
In the same situation, you will need to take care of the sites that are created by building Governance Plan to maintain them based on recurring actions, like:
- Verification of the site owner
- Assignment to the department, project team etc.
- Usage and storage of the site
Abowe you can find examples of the recurring, maintain actions that should be included into your Governance Plan which will help you in taking control about SharePoint sites without harming your buisness 😉
Without the implementation of the review processes, you risk to having out of control, messy environment.
Finally, the decision about using of SharePoint site creation self-service have to be made by you in your, unique organization environment.
How to manage SharePoint site creation Self Service
In the first step, you will need to is log in to Office 365
1. Open Office 365
Open Office 365 site using https://office.com address. In Office site choose Admin button.
2. Open SharePoint Administration Center
When you will open Admin site choose Admin centers (1) and then SharePoint Admin Center (2).
3. Open SharePoint Settings
In SharePoint Admin Center choose Settings (1) tab.
3. Set Site Creation setting
You have to find the option called Site Creation. You will have to available options:
- Hide the Create site command (1) – Turning off SharePoint site creation self-service
- Show the Create site command (2) – Turning on SharePoint site creation self-service
F.A.Q.
When the change will appear for the users?
Changes could be visible for the users after 5-15 minutes because of the caching services on the server and browser side.
Is it possible to make an exception for this setting?
No. This is global setting set for all sites.
Can I change the setting in Preview version of SharePoint Admin Center?
It is not yet possible (verified at Q4 2018).
