Setting the stage for creating SharePoint sites has never been an easy task. Overloaded with new site requests, IT often struggles to respond in a timely manner. This causes delays and frustration for users. On the other hand, allowing users complete freedom, often results in chaotic tenants with inconsistent sites, making it difficult to maintain governance and ensure a consistent user experience.
In this article, we will explore a simpler approach: creating sites based on templates, directly from SharePoint. Using organization pre-approved templates allows end-users to self-serve for new sites while maintaining control over site structure, policies, and compliance. This approach increases user productivity and ensures consistency across the organization's processes.
Site templates in SharePoint
SharePoint site templates provide a powerful mechanism for streamlining site creation and ensuring consistency across your organization. A site template is essentially a blueprint that defines the structure, content, and settings of a SharePoint site, by which you can:
- Accelerate site provisioning.
- Enforce consistency.
- Boost user productivity.
Unfortunately, this out-of-the-box capability is limited, as it is not only difficult to create and publish new templates, as there is no way to reinforce policies or set user targeting.
Creating tailored templates with BindTuning
BindTuning empowers you to create highly customized SharePoint templates that go beyond the limitations of out-of-the-box options. With its powerful features, you can:
- Define templates that perfectly align with your processes (like employee onboarding, project management, event organization, and so on).
- Enforce your own policies, by template. Namely, defining naming conventions, applying the right sensitivity labels, setting external user access, controlling ownership and membership, and so much more.
- Trigger approval workflows, making sure that, even if users request new sites based on template, the necessary approvals will be in place.
- Set audience targeting, ensuring that templates are only made available to specific users. As an example, a Marketing Campaign Site template should only be available to marketing managers.
Publishing your templates to SharePoint
Once your site template is created, the next step is to publish it to SharePoint, making it available for users to self-serve. Internal users will have access to a gallery of pre-approved templates, with all guardrails in place:
Here's a general overview of the publishing process:
- Create a template with BindTuning. Ensure the template includes all necessary components (structure and content, rules, policies, approvals, ...).
- In template edit mode, go to "Save and Publish".
- Turn on the SharePoint toggle.
- Click "Publish". You're all set :)
Ready to revolutionize your SharePoint site creation experience? Start your 14-day free trial of BindTuning today, and create and publish your first template. During this period, you'll have full access to Automate365, our powerful site templating tool, with advanced provisioning, governance, and tenant insights. Experience the future of Microsoft 365 management firsthand.
Create your first template
Discover how BindTuning can transform your Microsoft 365 environment. Download our product sheet or book a call to learn more about our powerful capabilities and how they can benefit your organization.
