How to use & customise the SharePoint lookbook for your intranet
- John Scott
Modern SharePoint is an extremely flexible tool that can meet multiple use cases to support communication and collaboration inside an organisation. This means intranet teams and site owners have a lot of choice in how they structure and design individual sites and pages.
Recognising this, Microsoft has created the SharePoint Lookbook, a collection of site templates and designs that can be viewed and then actually deployed on to your SharePoint tenant. The Lookbook is an extremely useful resource that both provides inspiration and a way to give teams a head start in setting up a site.
The Lookbook can help you get the best out of SharePoint, although sometimes this is still not enough for teams who want more flexibility and control over how their site looks in order for it to be fully compliant.
In this post we’re going to explore what the SharePoint Lookbook is, why it is useful, the kind of templates it contains, what to consider when using it, and how to use the Lookbook in conjunction with Lightspeed365 features.
How is SharePoint so flexible?
One of the strengths of SharePoint is its flexibility and versatility to support multiple use cases, usually as part of a wider intranet. A strategy page for leadership communications, a departmental site for the sales function, a site for onboarding employees, a place for your volunteering community to come together. All these and more can be achieved using modern SharePoint.
One of the reasons for this flexibility is the ability to add, arrange and configure multiple web parts – the basic “building blocks” of SharePoint – on any given site and page. This means you can have multiple combinations on a page to create different experiences that meet various needs. It also gives intranet teams and individual site owners a lot of choice in how they design and structure individual sites, which are either standalone or sit within a wider intranet structure.
This flexibility can leave some teams wondering what the best structure and design is for their site. This is where the SharePoint Lookbook can act as a useful resource for both reference and deployment.
What is the SharePoint Lookbook?
The SharePoint Lookbook is a publicly available site provided by Microsoft that can be reached at https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-look-book/. As Microsoft itself describes it, it provides an opportunity to “create beautiful, fast sites and pages” and “get inspired with these designs or add them to your tenant to start building your next stunning site with them.”
What’s in the SharePoint Lookbook?
Within the Lookbook there is a:
- A gallery of SharePoint templates covering major use cases and scenarios.
- Information about the design of each template including site features, web parts used, and content included.
- A call to action for administrators with the correct permissions to deploy a Lookbook template to their tenant.
Which communication site templates are available in the SharePoint Lookbook?
The SharePoint Lookbook has downloadable templates that cover both communication and team sites. The following use cases are covered for communication sites:
- Brand Central (brand assets)
- Crisis management
- Department
- Event
- Human resources (HR information)
- Leadership connection
- Learning central
- New employee onboarding
- Organisation home (cross over with intranet homepage)
- Showcase (for a product, event etc.)
- Standard communication
- Volunteer centre.
Which team site templates for collaboration are available in the SharePoint Lookbook?
There are also several team site templates that cover some useful collaboration scenarios:
- Event planning
- IT Help Desk
- Project management
- Retail management team
- Training course
- Training design team.
You will almost certainly find some templates more useful than others, depending on your needs. But they all provide a starting point and also a great way to kickstart a few ideas.
What are the benefits of using a SharePoint Lookbook template?
Using templates from the SharePoint Lookbook has a number of benefits:
- Providing inspiration: The Lookbook provides tangible and achievable examples of site designs across multiple use cases and scenarios; it’s a great starting point to stimulate ideas.
- Increasing speed to market: Site owners can get a huge head start in providing a template that can be deployed in minutes and then modified to suit your needs, reducing the time needed to get a site up and running.
- Supporting new and busy site owners: Some site owners who are not trained communicators can lack confidence in using SharePoint or can be very time-stretched; the head start provided by a Lookbook theme provides confidence and resourcing.
- Encouraging good use cases and adoption: Lookbook templates reflect good practices and showcase the best of what SharePoint has to offer; this can help encourage good use of SharePoint, in turn leading to good adoption and high value use cases.
- No costs involved: The use of the SharePoint Lookbook is completely free so does not come at any additional cost on top of your normal Microsoft 365 subscription.
Four challenges associated with using SharePoint Lookbook templates
However, there are some considerations in using the SharePoint Lookbook and its templates.
1. A template is not a finished site
A Lookbook template is not going to be complete. It will likely need more work on it to truly optimise it to meet a particular business need within your organisation. For example, it might be missing a particular web part. However, site owners might consider a site “complete” because it is a Microsoft template and therefore reflecting best practices. It is likely that content owners still need additional guidance and support from the central intranet or communications team to complete a site.
2. Still needs to fit in with your Information Architecture and security
A deployed template site also needs to fit into your existing Information Architecture and align with your security policies, so any site generated from the Lookbook will need further configuration.
3. A template might bypass governance processes
Many intranet, communication and digital workplace teams want to establish governance about the use of SharePoint sites to deliver business value, minimise duplication, ensure adherence to standards and support alignment with a content strategy.
Automatically deploying a template on your tenant could bypass provisioning and other governance processes, particularly if your IT function carries out SharePoint administration duties but has a different view on site creation to the intranet team. For example, it can encourage the creation of a lot of standalone sites that lead to site sprawl and associated problems such as poor findability.
4. Not aligning with custom branding
Some organisations want to establish specific designs for their digital workplace or intranet that better align with their brand standards. In these cases, the SharePoint Lookbook templates may not align with the look and feel that the brand team are after. In these cases, an organisation may choose to deploy custom branding or use a product like Lightspeed 365 that provides more control over the look and feel of SharePoint. Some organisations may even need to introduce custom branding across multiple sub-brands.
How Lightspeed 365 features extend the power of SharePoint
Lightspeed365 features are designed to complement SharePoint and extend its ROI. You get access to a whole additional library of features (web parts) that:
- Complete some of the inherent and frustrating gaps in SharePoint that you need to deliver a world-class intranet or communication hub.
- Provides more flexibility in the look and feel so you can actually align with your brand standards – even across multiple sub-brands if required.
- Delivers additional control and governance required to support a global intranet.
Can I use the SharePoint Lookbook with Lightspeed 365?
The answer is yes! Because Lightspeed365 extends the power of SharePoint, it can also extend the power of the SharePoint templates in the Lookbook but help you overcome some of key challenges around brand flexibility and template governance.
How can I extend the power of Lookbook templates?
Lightspeed365 can extend the power of Lookbook templates in a number of ways.
Providing branding tools to support brand flexibility
- Our branding tools allow teams to deploy customer brand elements including colours and fonts, while specifying where these should be applied. Teams can define a main corporate brand and multiple sub-brands and themes if they wish, not only to align with your brand portfolio, but even to identify different sections of your intranet, for example.
Develop your own templates
- Lightspeed365 allows you to create your own page templates – albeit with much greater flexibility than the Lookbook. In creating these you could leverage a Lookbook template as the starting point and then add more Lightspeed365 features to get the exact look and feel you want. You can also use some of Lightspeed365’s own site templates that come bundled with the product for popular use cases such as community or project sites.
- In creating your own templates, you can use the extended, combined library of SharePoint and Lightspeed365 web parts to create a range of modern and striking designs.
Greater control
- Using Lightspeed365 templates also enables you to execute stronger control to ensure different areas of the site inherent the right theme rather than allowing different content owners to implement different templates. You’ll avoid the messy, inconsistent and non-brand compliant jumble of SharePoint sites that can rapidly evolve.
- For those accessing Premium Lightspeed365 features, there is even more control using the site provisioning tool that can triage requests for new sites, create approval workflow and even assign appropriate templates.
Getting the best out of the SharePoint Lookbook
- In our view the SharePoint Lookbook is an excellent resource that used properly can help save time, and encourage the best use of SharePoint, but there are limitations.
- Using an additional product like Lightspeed365 can make all the difference to extend brand flexibility, extend your control over templates, and help you to create fantastic looking intranets.
Need help? Get in touch!
If you’d like to discuss how Lightspeed365 can be used in conjunction with the SharePoint Lookbook, or how you can extend your design options in SharePoint, then get in touch!
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