Team Sites

If your goal is to share information with a large audience while only having a few site editors that can create and edit content, you might want to make a communication site, not a team site.

A team site is a centralized location for you and your team to collaborate on projects, share and store documents, chat, and exchange information. With a team site, all members can contribute, view, and edit all content.

Some examples of team sites might be:

  • A repository for a research team to store and edit notebooks and files.
  • A place for your direct team to collaborate on files and projects while consolidating emails and Microsoft Teams chat communications.
  • An internal department site for the department administrators to upkeep and edit budget files

You can create a new SharePoint team site directly from the SharePoint website.

All members of a team site can contribute, view, and edit all content.

Site owners can add or remove members from the site at any point.

You or other team members can also grant permissions to specific individuals that aren’t part of your team to view specific files, document folders, or document libraries.

The home page of a team site by default is focused on collaborating on and co-authoring files and content, staying up to date on project status, and seeing the latest activity by team members  on the site.

The layout of a team site is designed for easy collaboration between team members, such as working on a research project. Each team member will see the same site, and each team member can edit the site. Team sites can have many pages, but each page has the same menu options.

  • The main site navigation is the sidebar on the left side of the page.
    • You can customize what shortcuts appear in the left sidebar.
    • By default, the sidebar will have a link to team notebooks, all document libraries, other pages on the site, and a primary list of the site contents.
  • The main site page consists of panel sections, such as site news, recent activity, or a quick preview of all documents stored on the site.
    • Team members can collectively change what each page on the site looks like: what panels are on each page and how they are arranged. Like a shared document, these page edits will be reflected for every team member.