SharePoint Online Home Sites

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A new feature released by Microsoft in June 2020 allows a SharePoint Admin to turn the company's main internal landing site as a new home site. This is achieved at the time of writing  by running a simple PowerShell script against the desired site. Once done your SharePoint Communication site will be at the heart of your organisation and putting it one click away for users.

I've had the opportunity to use this new feature a couple of times now and these are some notes to help you if you want to replicate in your environment or just understand what the home site is all about. While I've been getting used to it, I've found the Microsoft information useful in guiding me.

What you need?

The following PowerShell modules are required to run the scripts:
  • Microsoft.Online.SharePoint,PowerShell
  • SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline
Users repeating these steps require SharePoint Admin rights to successfully run the commands on a site.

Resources

Official Microsoft guidance on setting up the homesite:

What you need to know about home sites

  • Only one site can be set as a home site
  • Search on the site is scoped for all sites within the organisation
  • The site becomes setup as an organisational news site
  • News from this site is highlighted with the site name boxed above the news title.
  • News published in the home site is featured in users "News from sites" in the SharePoint App landing page.
  • Mobile friendly - once a site is assigned a home site, the SharePoint Mobile App will have a home button added on the find tab of the app. This puts users within a click of accessing the home site.
  • The communication site that will become a home site can be a hub site but can't be associated with another hub
  • It can take several minutes for the changes to take effect
  • If run the command again to switch home site to a different site it can take up to 2 hours

What are the benefits?

  • Puts site at the heart of your organisation.
  • News is promoted to users in their news feed in office 365, via the SharePoint start page.
  • Home button on the mobile app.
  • Searches performed on the site look across the tenant not just the hub or site.

What are the downsides?

  • Create a new page disappears from the home page under the new command so you have to navigate to site contents if you want to create anything other than a news post.
  • Also a benefit but maybe a downside for some, searches performed on the site look across the tenant not just the hub or site. If you wanted to limit the searches just to this site and any sites associated with it, you may want to stick with hub site(s).

Steps to create a SharePoint Home Site

  1. Create a communication site and configure as needed. Remember this will become your landing page for the organisation, so spend time creating the site and making it the place your staff will want to visit.
  2. Use PowerShell to run the below scripts (with your modifications)

The PowerShell script

# Variable: Amend these variables to suit 
$adminSiteUrl = "https://COMPANY-admin.sharepoint.com"
$homeSiteUrl = "https://COMPANY.sharepoint.com/sites/SITE-NAME"

# Connection - uses above adminSiteUrl variable to connect to your tenant
Connect-SPOService $adminSiteUrl -Credential $cred

# Set home site using the variable $homeSiteUrl
Set-SPOHomeSite -HomeSiteUrl $homeSiteUrl

# Confirmation the home site has been set.
Write-Host "Home site has been set" -ForegroundColor Green

Conclusions

The script only takes a short time to run but may take some time for the changes to filter through. For me the changes seemed to happen within a few minutes. It's a relatively simple script that helps elevate a communication site to the centre of your business with the additional benefits mentioned. 

I have found this really beneficial for company intranet or portals. At present it seems more suited to mobile devices with the Home button getting added to the SharePoint app once you have run the script. This means for mobile users their home site for the company is one click away. In the future there will also be a home site app for Teams, this will continue to improve access for users and again make Teams your organisations key app for launching the content your staff need.

I hope this has been useful and helps you get started creating a home site for your organisation.  
Location: United Kingdom

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