WonderLaura @iwmentor – Laura Rogers

Would you like to have one place where everyone in your company lands every morning? That’s exactly what a SharePoint home site gives you. In part one, we covered how to bring SharePoint into Teams with libraries, tabs, and shortcuts. Now, let’s take it a big step further. In this week’s Power Hour, I built a home site from scratch, sent announcements, and pushed it to everyone in Teams. There are a lot of moving parts across several admin centers. Here are the steps, and associated video.

🏠 What Is a SharePoint Home Site?

A SharePoint home site is a communication site that you designate as the main landing spot for your organization. You’ll also see it called a Viva Connections experience. Those two terms mean the same thing.

A home site gives you:

• A home link that follows people across every SharePoint site
• Global navigation pushed across the whole tenant
• A default SharePoint app in Teams
• Company-wide announcements
• A dashboard for Teams and mobile

In other words, it ties your whole intranet together.

⚙️ How to Create a SharePoint Home Site

Let’s build one from scratch. This part is for admins:

1. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, go to Settings > Viva > Viva Connections.
2. Click Create and manage Viva Connections experiences.
3. Choose Create new, then choose an existing site.
4. Paste the URL of your communication site. (It has to be a communication site.)
5. Click Create experience.
6. Open the new experience and enable it. Until you do, it stays in draft.

A couple of heads-ups here. First, many tenants already list the main landing site as a home site by default. In my demo tenant, it was already there, so I couldn’t add it again. I just had to enable the one that was there.

👥 Target Home Sites to Different Audiences

You can create more than one home site and target each one to a different audience. Just know that two or more experiences require a Microsoft Viva Suite or Viva Communications and Communities license. Microsoft even shows a warning about this when you add the second one.

To scope an experience, click Edit audience. Then filter by:

• License type, like frontline workers or information workers
• Entra ID security groups
• Microsoft 365 groups

Note that you can’t assign the same group as the audience of two different home sites. After all, how would Teams know which one to show? You can also add site owners here, so other people can manage the home site settings.

Now think about what that means. Each audience gets its own SharePoint home site, with its own navigation and its own Teams experience.

🧩 Manage Your SharePoint Home Site Settings

Once a site becomes a home site, a new Manage home site option appears in the site’s settings gear.

SharePoint App for Teams: Custom vs. Fixed Layout

This setting controls what people see when they open the SharePoint app in Teams. Click Set up experience to choose what people see when they open SharePoint in Teams. The names are a little confusing, so here’s the difference

• Custom layout shows your SharePoint home site’s actual homepage, web parts and all.
• Fixed layout shows a dashboard with news across the top, dashboard cards, and a Resources section of links.

Be patient after switching, though. It can take up to a couple of hours to update.

Analytics

Under SharePoint app for Teams analytics, click View analytics. Once people are using it, you’ll see traffic and usage for both the Teams app and the home site dashboard.

📣 Send Company-Wide Announcements

Announcements let you push a short message across your organization. To create one:

1. Click Manage announcements, then click New announcement.
2. Add a title and message.
3. Pick an audience. It’s required, and there’s no “everyone” option. Also, SharePoint groups won’t work here.
4. Schedule it and set an end date, optionally.
5. Add a link. It’s optional, so a text-only announcement works too.
6. Preview it and click Send announcement.

Careful, though. You can’t edit an announcement after it’s published. You can only delete it.

Additionally, you can turn on regional filtering in the announcement settings. That lets you target frontline workers by location, department, and job title.

Announcements vs. News

So how is this different from news? News posts are files in a Site Pages library, so permissions can limit who sees them. Announcements, on the other hand, are tied to the SharePoint home site itself. As a result, they spread across the organization much more easily. Announcements are also extremely short and simple, just a couple of sentences. Want them on a regular page? Just add the Announcements web part.

SharePoint App in Teams

When you go to Teams, and add the SharePoint app down the left, you’ll immediately see your home site. In this example, I chose the Fixed Layout in the Set up Experience setting, so that’s what I see here.

📊 Build the Layout

This Teams fixed layout experience has four main parts:

1. Announcements appear across the top automatically.
2. News scrolls below that. You can choose which sites the news comes from and pin specific items. Keep in mind that news is inherently security trimmed, so people only see news from sites they can access.
3. Dashboard lets you add cards like assigned tasks, approvals, and events. You can drag them around to arrange them, too. Here’s my blog post: Master the SharePoint Dashboard Web Part
4. Resources holds your links. You can import SharePoint links, change icons, and audience-target each link.

📌 Make the SharePoint Home Site the Default App in Teams

Here’s the finale. This is for Teams admins. Here’s how to make SharePoint the top app in Teams for everyone:

1. Open the Teams admin center.
2. Go to Teams apps > Setup policies.
3. Open your Global (Org-wide default) policy, or another policy you’ve created.
4. Under pinned apps, click Add apps and choose SharePoint.
5. Move SharePoint to the top of the list.
6. Click Save.

It can take a while to show up. However, once it does, people open Teams in the morning and land right on your SharePoint home site. Also, you can create different setup policies for different groups, so each group gets its own set of pinned apps.

🧭 Set Up Home Site Global Navigation

I saved one of my favorites for last. On your home site, go to Global navigation and choose Home site navigation. Then add your links. You can create multiple levels with sub-links. Plus, you can turn on audience targeting for the nav links too. Notice here that I just have three navigation items: Power Hour Welcome, Human Resources, and IT.

Now, the home icon at the top left follows people to every SharePoint site. Notice here that when I’m on ANY site in SharePoint, and I hover over that Home logo at the top left, I get those 3 navigation items:

Here’s a tip. Some companies create a SharePoint home site purely for this navigation. Even if nobody visits the site itself, even if you don’t use the SharePoint app in Teams, the links still spread across the whole tenant.

❓ FAQ: SharePoint Home Site

🎯 Wrapping Up

As you can see, a SharePoint home site does a lot more than host a homepage. It gives you audience targeting, announcements, a dashboard, global navigation, and a default app in Teams.

Want to see it all in action? Watch the full replay below, in the second half of this episode. Also, join us live for Power Hour on Wednesdays at 11 Central, and vote on upcoming topics in my Tuesday newsletter. And if you’re ready to go deeper, check out the courses at IW Mentor. Ultimate members even get live Q&A sessions with me and my team every three weeks.

Resources:

Set up Viva Connections in the Microsoft 365 admin center – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn

Use announcements in Viva Connections – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn