Tracy van der Schyff

#Office365Challenge First of a couple of posts all about the Publishing Features and Publishing Sites in SharePoint.

Now I must admit – I have never worked with Publishing Sites in SharePoint – so I have quite a lot to learn. As always I’ll appreciate any comments to help me in the right direction. Researching the topic didn’t deliver much either – or maybe I’m just too stubborn to understand. But let’s do this and figure it out together.

What is a Publishing Site:

Publishing site:    “A blank site for expanding your Web site and quickly publishing Web pages. Contributors can work on draft versions of pages and publish them to make them visible to readers. This site includes document and image libraries for storing Web publishing assets.”  Resource

What I get from this is that Publishing sites are much more focussed on Web Content Management (Public facing sites) and Team sites are for Collaboration (Document Management).

Today I’ll start with what I do know (a bit). Publishing Features. As I’ve mostly used Team Site Templates, I occasionaly have to activate the Publishing Features  to enable certain functionality.

Usually this relates to Navigation. Publishing Features replaces the Top Link bar with Global Navigation and settings for both the Global Navigation and Quick Launch are specified. It also allows for Managed Metadata Navigation (which I use in my libraries).

No need to reinvent the wheel, here is a great resource that gives an overview of the Publishing features (SharePoint 2013).

Below are the steps to activate Publishing Features on your normal Team Site:

Go to your Site Settings > Manage Site Features:

Under Site Features, activate the Publishing Features:

Note:  When Publishing Features are activated, you can no longer save your site as a template.

Catch you tomorrow when we delve more into Publishing Sites.

Overview of my challenge: As an absolute lover of all things Microsoft, I’ve decided to undertake the challenge, of writing a blog every single day, for the next 365 days. Crazy, I know. And I’ll try my best, but if I cannot find something good to say about Office 365 and the Tools it includes for 365 days, I’m changing my profession. So let’s write this epic tale of “Around the Office in 365 Days”. My ode to Microsoft Office 365.

Keep in mind that these tips and tricks do not only apply to Office 365 – but where applicable, to the overall Microsoft Office Suite and SharePoint.