Introduction to SharePoint Communication Sites

by Charles Waghmare

A SharePoint Online communication site is a place to share information such as news, reports, statuses, and events in a visually captivating format with a large audience within your organization.

SharePoint Communication sites for are ideal for internal collaboration regarding campaigns, news, insights, business highlights, year-end leaders reviews, and new customer wins. To jump-start user collaboration, communication sites provides configurable templates for the sites and pages within to make your life easy while communicating messages to a large audience in a small amount of time.

Benefits of SharePoint Communication Sites

With communication sites, you can make it 2-way and therefore collaborative. Using Yammer Web Part embedding into your sites, such 2-way communication can be facilitated. The moment any news is published, the user can voice their opinion through Yammer and embed it into site. With communication sites, you can tackle the second challenge of IC not being focused on employees. This collaborative experience can also be added using a Yammer group or a Team site. You can use the embedded Web Part to add content from other sources such as social media sites and business content sites and make them available on your communication site page. You can also use a Kindle Web Part to share previews of books or Microsoft forms to create survey quizzes and polls. Other web parts available in communication sites will help you encourage user engagement and involve users in the communication journey. SharePoint Administrator or Office 365 can easily create a communicate sites, and within 10 minutes your communication site can be ready with important news that you want to share.

Today, most Intranet users who use communications managers are social media users and use technologies such as Cloud, Azure, and others.  Therefore, it is important that we give our user community a similar experience inside their organizations. SharePoint Communication sites are available under the Office 365 product family, and once you get this service you do not have to manage is, as it is Microsoft who will manage the service while your organization will be consumer of the service. No more headache jobs of monitoring, database upgrading, patch fixing, maintaining, etc. It is all done by Microsoft. SharePoint Online also provides a mobile app through which users can view organizational communication anytime. 

The book Beginning SharePoint Communication Sites will help you understand what a SharePoint Communication site is, how to create a beautiful communication site in seconds from the SharePoint Home that is available in Office 365, how to improve the method of communication and collaboration with a large audience, how to integrate your existing collaboration channels with your SharePoint Communication site, the organizational benefits of communication sites, and plenty more. Communication sites allow people to create and share timely updates that go beyond email. In short, if you are interested in changing both the communication and collaboration experience in your organization, this book is the end-to-end guide for you.

Also, my book will guide you with how to embed documents, video, and how to dynamically pull real-time data from across your Office 365 programs including documents from SharePoint, Power BI reports, Microsoft Stream videos, and Yammer discussions. My book also describes ways in which you can create and edit content through SharePoint mobile apps.

Reader’s Take-Aways from Beginning SharePoint Communication Sites

• Enrich end-user experience while sharing information with a bigger audience
• Design a visually compelling Intranet
• Transform the way you share information within your company

About the Author

Charles David Waghmare worked as Global Yammer Community Manager from 2011 until mid-2018 with Capgemini. Previously he was Community Manager of SAP-based communities at ATOS where he managed communities using TechnoWeb 2.0 – a Yammer-like platform. In this Communities of Practice (CoP) initiative, Charles was also responsible for managing community sites built in SharePoint. Further, at ATOS, Charles was global rollout manager for a structured document-management system built in SharePoint. The Capgemini Yammer network, one of the largest Yammer networks, was moderated by Charles to make Yammer a wonderful experience for each Capgemini user. At Capgemini, his responsibility was to manage the Yammer network containing over 135K+ users and enterprise social knowledge management platform called KM3.0, which also contained over 100K users. Charles was a major contributor to the next-generation knowledge-management platform called KM4.0 using SharePoint Online.

This article was contributed by Charles Waghmare, author of Beginning SharePoint Communication Sites.