Creating your SharePoint Online site

Modern SharePoint Online (SPO) gives you lots of options to deliver your content in new and attractive ways. No matter what type of site you request, once you’ve taken delivery of your new SPO site you’re ready to shape it to fit many different requirements.  

Features available  

Microsoft is continually developing the tools we use every day, but lots of useful functionality is already available in SharePoint so we can build attractive, responsive and accessible sites for desktop and mobile users. Here are a few useful features: 

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  Pre-built templates (applied after you take delivery of your new site) will help you get started when covering many University use cases for SharePoint such as project planning, HR related sites, disaster management, meeting and committee management and IT Service Desk sites.

• Modern web parts (which make up your site) do the heavy lifting, allowing you to summarise and share your content in interesting and visually attractive ways.
• Rich media experiences (such as image web parts, SharePoint Spaces and video integration and embedding) can be built using SharePoint’s modern image, navigation and video web parts. 

Using Microsoft’s 'modern experience', SharePoint Online is easy to use and has lots of features to help us all work better. All the ‘old favourite’ features of SharePoint, such as Document Libraries and Lists have been modernised and allow integration with other Nexus365 services such as Teams and OneDrive for Business.  

Browse some of the templates available now and take a look at a case study showing how the Law Faculty is getting the most out of modern SharePoint for their intranet.

Coming soon 

The Microsoft365 roadmap is a good place to view upcoming improvements and features. Here are a few things coming to SharePoint that we think will be useful when they are available:  

• Collaboration options for pages and news articles including simultaneous co-authoring.  
• Design ideas offering inspirational suggestions for making your content even more attractive, similar to the design ideas in PowerPoint.  
• A new Forms experience for modern SharePoint lists, improving accessibility across different devices and platforms, with more design options available through your site lists and libraries.  
• Stream on SharePoint content provision allowing new ways to embed video content into pages, with automatic transcription and captioning for any videos hosted in Stream on SharePoint.  
• Dedicated video pages to help highlight your video content in more attractive ways, branded to suit your site’s look and feel.  
• Coloured folders are coming to SharePoint and OneDrive, giving you a more visually impactive way to organise your content in modern document libraries.  
• Better page sharing options to help you control access to information and news published in your sites.  

Finding answers

The best way to keep up to date with what’s going on in SharePoint Online is to join the Nexus365 User Group (NUG) on Teams, the code is LNJVOFR. 

Through the SharePoint Online User Group channel, you can share your experiences or tips and tricks for using SharePoint Online with others across the University and find informal support.   

The SPO guidance is a great starting point for finding out how to use this versatile software and getting the most out of it.  Lots more information about how to get SPO help, advice and training is also available on our IT Help website.

Top tip   

Build a modern calendar in your site in just a few clicks (this is far better than the ‘classic mode’ Events list). Lots of information is on our Creating a 'Modern' SharePoint Calendar in your site page.

More information can be found on Microsoft’s SharePoint Next steps tips page as well as our quick reference guides and training information on the IT Help website.