SharePoint Online 2013 - Sites tab and self service site creation ~ Blog moved to www.jasperoosterveld.com

The Office 365 Technical Preview has a really nice new top navigation. You can read all about it here. One part of the top navigation is Sites:

There is a button called new site, through this button users are able to create a new team site. The administrator of the Office 365 Tenant can configure the location for the sites to be deployed. You can go to Admin, SharePoint and Settings. You will see the following option:

You don't want to use this option? Just hide the link by selecting the first option. Do you decide you want to use this feature? There are a couple of decisions you have to make:

Create sites under:
Define the path where the site is going to be created.

Site classification:
By selecting required or optional the users have or can select a site policy.

Secondary contact:
Does the user need to enter an additional site owner? Yes? Select Required.

I am not sure what the option Use the form at this URL does but perhaps a custom form to create new sites?

All the users will be able to create sites but there are a couple of important facts:

1.) The site will always be based at the team site template. There is no option to change this.

This does not have to be an issue but I can imagine that some customers would like to use a custom template or even the project site template. Hopefully this will be adjustable in the future.

2.) The users need to have create site permissions at the root site

My first thought was "Now all the users can change important site settings at the home level" because they got Full Control permissions. Microsoft Support mentioned the fact that you, DUH, can create a custom site permission. To create such a custom site permission follow these instructions:

In SharePoint Admin Center create a new Site Collection e. g. https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sssc (Self-Service Site Creation) e. g. with “Blank Site” Template
Go to the SSSC Site Collection and go to “Settings > Site Settings > Site permissions”
Click at “Permission Levels” in the Ribbon
Click at “Add a Permission Level”
Enter “Create Subsites” as Name and select “Create Subsites” (from the Site Permissions group) – this will auto-select some other needed Permissions
Click at “Create”
Go back to “Settings > Site Settings > Site permissions”
Click at “Create Group” in the Ribbon
Enter “Self-Service Site Creation Subsite Creators” as name for the New Group and select the “Create Subsites” as Permission Level
Click at “Create”
Click at “New > Add Users”
Enter “Everyone in my organization” in the “Add people to the ??? group” (and unselect “Send an email invitation” under Options)
Go back to the SharePoint Admin Center and go to the “settings” area
Enter “sites/sssc” unter the “Start a Site” section for “Create sites under:”

Thanks Microsoft Support :-) Stupid me ;-)

There is one last interesting aspect of this self service site creation. A lot of new sites can be created and as an administration you want some control. SharePoint Online 2013 has the option to create site policies! Go to the new site collection you created and click at Site Actions, Site Settings and Site Policies. The following screen will appear:

The cool thing is that you can connect a workflow with the site policy. I have not tried this yet but definitely worth a new article :-) In my case I used the following settings:

By using a policy you can control the amount of sites created by users. I had some issues in my tenant because the site did not get deleted but I am sure this works fine in the on premise version and in the future RTM release of SharePoint Online 2013. Steve Mann wrote an great article about policies, you can check it out by clicking here.