SharePoint Site Types Explained: Team, Communication, Project & More!

SharePoint is a well-known service used by organizations across the world to manage documents and seamless collaboration. It comes with various types of SharePoint sites, each of which has specific benefits and limitations. To leverage SharePoint’s full potential, it is essential to understand SharePoint site types, their uses, and features. In this write-up, we will explore the different types of sites, and which suits your business structure best. Let’s start our discussion with the same.

What are SharePoint Site Types?

SharePoint sites are used by Microsoft’s SharePoint system to store, manage, and share user data efficiently. It offers real-time collaboration with which several users can work on the same project from any location. This makes most of the tasks easy, like broadcasting the same information (e.g., meeting timings) across the organizations. Additionally, for better storage space, and management, sites offer the benefit of the document library and users can copy document library to another SharePoint site efficiently if needed. 

There are several types of SharePoint sites, and the primary ones are:

• Communication Sites
• Team Sites
• Hub Sites
• Project Sites
• Publishing Sites

Let’s explore SharePoint Site types in detail:

1. Communication Sites

Communication sites are used to share information with a wider audience. For example, if a company’s CEO has to announce something, then this helps to broadcast the message across the company in one go. Moreover, it comes with various attractive templates, and layouts, which help to present ideas, or news effectively. Additionally, this can be used to share videos and images. 

When Use Communication Site?

The requirement for communication sites occurs when the need for broadcasting a message whether news or corporate updates to the entire company at the same time. They are primarily used to quickly share crucial messages with a large audience.

2. Team Sites

The team site is used to collaborate within small or medium-sized organizations. This is a centralized location where many users work in real time on the same document or project. Remember, we can create this site whether Office 365 Group-connected or non-connected. Furthermore, it offers various collaboration tools like document libraries, calendars, and many more, which makes this one of the most preferred SharePoint Site types. 

If your SharePoint is integrated with Microsoft Teams, then you can leverage many benefits such as real-time messaging, and document collaboration. One can customize the Team sites, according to their needs and organization structure.

When to Use Team Site?

Team sites are ideal when a group of a company, works on the same project. It offers enough space to store and share documents, calendars, and other data, which helps users to work efficiently.

3. Hub Sites

Hub sites offer the advantage of using teams and communication sites in one centralized location. One can access all the data of these sites through the Hub site effectively. So, users don’t need to move SharePoint list from one site to another, or any other data. Users can customize this according to their preferences like with branding, themes, and navigation options. 

When to Use Hub Site?

Hub sites are used when different departments within an organization need to collaborate or access the same content. This is one of the most widely used SharePoint Site types to enhance the collaboration experience.

4. Project Sites

Project sites are specifically designed to help users to work on the same project simultaneously, without any hassle. It offers various tools to make creating a project task seamless such as tracking deadlines and storing documents. It offers various features like built-in task management and real-time access to the document library.

When to Use Project Site?

It is mainly used to complete short-term goals, like product launches, research initiatives, etc. Users can track project status within this site.

5. Publishing Sites

Publishing sites are designed to create and publish high-quality content like blogs, and intranet pages, across an organization. It provides content approval workflows, which ensures that content is correct and ready to go live. Additionally, to make the blog more attractive, it allows to addition of images, videos, and other elements. 

When to Use a Publishing Site?

Publishing sites are best suited for those organizations that more focus on content quality, and publication. Some of the examples where Publishing sites are used i.e. intranet homepages, and news articles.

SharePoint Site Types – Comparison Table!

After reading out all the types of SharePoint sites, most of the users getting confused, that which is better for them. If yes, then go through the below table to gain more insights into the same:

Feature	Team Site	Communication Site	Project Site	Hub Site	Publishing Site
Document Library	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Task Management	Yes	No	Yes	No	No
Real-time Collaboration	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Content Broadcasting	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Customizable Layouts	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Integration with Microsoft Teams	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Navigation Across Multiple Sites	No	No	No	Yes	No

How to Create SharePoint Sites?

Now that you’ve decided which site you want to use from different SharePoint Site types, follow the step-by-step instructions to create it:

• Go to the SharePoint Admin Center.
• Select from the available templates: Team site, Communication site, or a custom template.
• Now, provide the site details i.e. name, description, and privacy settings. Choose who can access the site. 
• After creation, you can modify the site, according to your preferences (e.g., add document libraries, lists, and shared calendars).
• Once all set, make the site available for the target audience. 

How to Manage SharePoint Sites? 

Managing SharePoint Site types is an essential task for organizations. To do so, follow these points: 

1. Regularly update permissions to avoid cyberattacks or unauthorized access. Properly define access levels i.e. Owners, and members. 
2. Maintain a consistent structure of your site, which helps to search the specific data easily.
3. Modify sites with SharePoint pre-structure layouts, and features. 
4. Leverage SharePoint analytics to track site activity and performance.
5. Use Power Automate to automatically do repetitive tasks. 
6. If you handling multiple types of SharePoint sites, and are frustrated by maintaining each of them individually, consider using the SharePoint Site Migration Tool. This helps to merge SharePoint sites, which makes a centralized location to manage or access the same data. Try this tool now, and bypass all the transition issues!

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Additional SharePoint Site Types!

Previously, we learned about the most preferred SharePoint sites, but there are more types offered by SharePoint, that are not much used by users. Still, we need to understand what are they. Let’s have a quick overview of them:

1. Document Center Site: It is used to manage large collections of documents effectively. 
2. Records Center Site: This helps in the management and preservation of records. 
3. Enterprise Wiki Site: Used to build and manage a wiki or knowledge base in an organization.
4. Blog Site: Helps to create quality blogs or content within a company. 
5. Community Site: This site is specially designed for building communities around topics.
6. Team Site with Microsoft 365 Groups: This is an advanced version of Team Sites that integrates with Microsoft 365 Groups.
7. External Sharing Site: Make it possible for users to safely share content with others.
8. Task List Site: Organize and monitor tasks inside a company.

Bring it All Together!

SharePoint offers multiple sites for organizations to store, share, and manage content like documents. Choosing one of them is the key to gaining the full benefits of this service. However, each site poses a specific benefit, so the question is which one is better. That’s why we created this guide, to explain to users about different SharePoint Site types, their uses, and which ones best suit their needs. After reading this article, we ensure that you have clear insights about the types of SharePoint sites.