SharePoint site types – Detailed Tutorial

If you want to know what are the different SharePoint site types, keep reading this tutorial. Here, we will discuss various types of sites in SharePoint that we can create and use inside an organization.

What are different SharePoint site types? There are different types of SharePoint sites like Team sites (modern team site and classic team sites), Communication sites, Document center sites/template, Enterprise wiki site/ templates, Publishing Portal, Developer site, Project site, Community site, eDiscovery center, Record center, Business Intelligence center, compliance policy center, Enterprise search center site, Community portal, and Visio process repository site.

Let us discuss the different types of sites in SharePoint Online or SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016, and SharePoint 2019.

SharePoint site types

Below are the various SharePoint site types that we can create and use in SharePoint.

Modern Team Sites (Group connected sites)

SharePoint team sites provide users and organizations easily and quickly collaborate and communicate. Using team sites, team members can easily share files, folders, and other resources on which they are looking to collaborate, and also team sites provide a simple and effective method for communication when it comes to working on projects involving multiple members.

In team sites, all members can contribute content and information to the site, but it is limited to the project and specific stakeholders.

For example HR(Human Resources) team site, Finance site, sites for your IT department, etc.

SharePoint Online provides the new modern team site having rich look and feel and lots of new features. The sites are also appear great in all the devices like desktop, tablet, laptop and mobile devices.

There are two types of modern team sites:

• Group connected modern team sites
• Modern team sites without an Office 365 group

In a group connected team sites, there will be Office 365 group associated with that. You can read more on Office 365 groups or Microsoft 365 groups.

When you create a modern Team Site you come through default functionality i.e News(in a news web part is used to share the latest development news ), Quick link (Quick link allows user to share URL with the rest of the team), Activity (activity web part will show the recent activity), and Documents( document web part display the site content including documents other site resources where a team member can easily find it.

You may like, Create site page in SharePoint online.

Modern Team Sites (without Office 365 group)

We can also create a modern team site without an Office 365 group. In this case, there will be no groups associated with the team site.

SharePoint classic team sites

A lot of organizations are still using the classic team sites. If you are still using classic team sites, you should plan to move to the modern experience in SharePoint online. There are a lot of new features available on modern team sites.

Below is an example of a classic SharePoint Online team site.

Communication site

SharePoint Communication site is used to share content, news, report, status with people across the organization. You can build communication sites for events, share product launch news, and many more resources you can share.

The communication site in SharePoint Online contains three different templates to build the site i.e Topic site(to share information like events, news, documents), Showcase(to showcase the images of the event and product launch), blank(you can create your customized templates). For example TS info-communication, College short trip

Document center site

SharePoint Document center site is used to store hundreds and thousands of documents (like word, pdf, and photos) and here you can easily manage the documents.

Enterprise Wiki site

SharePoint Enterprise wiki site is used to share a large volume of information. Here a group of people can share their ideas/information by creating pages and link them together.

Publishing Portal site

SharePoint Publishing portal site is a type of classic site. Publishing site is used for authoring and publishing content among a large volume of people.

Developer Site

The SharePoint Developer site is used for developing and deploying an app and it is developed using visual studio. Here you don’t need the app catalog site (it is a site where you can add in the app, that will be accessible by the production site) to deploy the solution because the SharePoint developer site creates an app catalog by default.

Mainly, we use the SharePoint developer site while developing SharePoint hosted apps or provider-hosted apps.

Project Site

A SharePoint Project site is used to track project details and assign a task to the people in the team, you can store your project requirement documents, and also you can track your project event by using a common calendar.

Community Site

A SharePoint Community site is a site where people can discuss and share their ideas virtually. It provides functionality where both can do discussion and share their ideas and learn from each other.

eDiscovery center

A SharePoint eDiscovery/Electronic discovery center is used to manage the preservation of content, search and export of exchange content, and SharePoint content stored across the SharePoint farm (SharePoint farm is a set of collection of the server which provides a set of basic SharePoint services to support a single site).

Record Center

A SharePoint Record center site is a central site repository in which we can manage and store the records.

In the Record center, records are deposited through the process, and it goes through record collection to record management to record depositions. It is a site where organizations manage legal and financial records.

Business Intelligence Center

A SharePoint Business Intelligence center is used especially for BI content such as data connection, reports, scorecards, and dashboards. BI site is a perfect place to store and share the report with the organization. This site contains prebuilt lists and libraries for BI content.

Compliance policy center

A SharePoint Compliance policy center, a site where you can use permission to control the policies. the policies can be recognized the different types of sensitive information, display a policy tip to users, automatically block access to the documents.

Enterprise search center

A SharePoint Enterprise search center site, where users search queries and results page. On this site, you can search verticals(it is displayed in the search navigation web part) people, conversations, and videos.

Community Portal

A SharePoint Community portal site is the list of the community site and through the community portal, users can search, discover, follow and visit the community site.

Visio Process Repository

A SharePoint Visio process repository site is a collection of document library (includes a functional column to show cross-functional flow-chart heading and the validation status of each diagram) functional which provides check-in and check-out functionality and provides versioning for Visio diagram.

Visio diagrams are flowcharts, data flow diagrams, process flow diagrams, and many more that are made with Visio software.

There are a few other site types are there also that you can use while creating sites for your organization in SharePoint.

SharePoint team site vs Document center

Let’s see what is the SharePoint Team site is and What is Document center is in SharePoint.The below table clearly represents the difference between the SharePoint Team site and the Document center in SharePoint:

SharePoint Team site	SharePoint Document center
The SharePoint team site connects you and your team to shared content and resources.	The SharePoint Document center site is used to store hundreds and thousands of documents like word, pdf, and photos.
We can easily track the project status on the SharePoint Team site	we can easily manage the documents in the SharePoint Document center.
The SharePoint team site is a SharePoint site that helps you and your team stay connected to the content, information, and applications that we use on a daily basis.	The SharePoint Document center site template is optimized for large-scale document management. It can save time and help us to be more efficient.
The SharePoint team site comes with pages, lists, and libraries that enable a group to collaborate and communicate.	We can use a Document Center site as an authoring environment or a content archive. In an authoring environment, users frequently check files in and out and create folder structures for those files.
The SharePoint team site includes a default document library for files, lists for data management.	We can also use a document center to store the archived document.

SharePoint Online root site

If you are a SharePoint developer, it is necessary to know what is a root site in SharePoint Online and how to get root site URL in office 365 SharePoint?

What is the root site?

The root site(top-level site) is one of the sites that is provisioned automatically when you set up Microsoft 365 that includes SharePoint. The URL of the root site is typically like:

https://<tenant name>.sharepoint.com/

Example: https://tsinfotechnologies.sharepoint.com/

And also you can recognize the root URL by the URL without any suffixes. The default name of the root site is the Communication site and the owner of this root site is Global Administrator.

How to get root site URL in Office 365?

Here we will learn how to recognize/get root site URL in office 365 SharePoint.

• Open your SharePoint admin center
• Under sites click on Active sites
• In Active sites, how can you recognize the root site from all different sites? Here you can find a column called Site Name with Communication Sites(by default when site is created), and column Primary admin/Created by with Global administrator.

Note: A SharePoint Root site cannot be deleted, only you can replace the site with different sites.

How to know whether a site is a SharePoint site or not?

Let us see, how to know whether a site is a SharePoint site or not?

We often come across many sites on the internet and intranet, we try to know that whether a site is a SharePoint site or not.

These are steps to know whether a site is based on SharePoint or not.

• The easy and simple way to check the page structure of the site, if the site is SharePoint, view the site URL have the pagename.aspx or not. If the site have .aspx as an extension then it is definitely a SharePoint site

• Right-click on the page of the site and click on view page source,
  • if site view page source contain:

<meta name= "GENERATOR" content="Microsoft SharePoint"/>

• In the view page source having javascript files used on the page, like init.js, core.js, and sp.js.

• SharePoint On-premise site is hosted on Internet Information Server (IIS), so we can check in HTTPResponse or by some other tools, that which server site is hosted in.

This is how to know whether a site is a SharePoint site or not.

You may like the following SharePoint tutorial:

• How to change SharePoint site collection URL or Address
• How to delete SharePoint site?
• Display warning message in SharePoint site using PowerShell
• Save site as template in SharePoint 2013/2016/Online
• Get sharepoint site template PowerShell
• How to get sharepoint site URL programmatically
• How to add parent site navigation to subsite in SharePoint?
• What is sharepoint online hub site?

In this SharePoint tutorial, we learned what are the different types of SharePoint sites that we can create for your organization.