What Are SharePoint Team Sites? Features, Setup & Microsoft 365 Integration

SharePoint Team Sites are workspaces which are created in Microsoft 365 to allow teams to have an integrated workspace to store documents and news. As indicated by Microsoft Learn, SharePoint Team Site is associated with a Microsoft 365 Group, which gives team members a shared mailbox, calendar, Teams channel, and Planner board in addition to the SharePoint Team Site. The five best features are: (1) Document libraries with version history and co-authoring allowing for editing of the document in real time by multiple people; (2) Team News to broadcast announcements to team members; (3) integration with Microsoft 365 products such as Teams, Outlook, and OneNote in one place; (4) customizable modern pages created using drag-and-drop web parts including calendars, quick links, and highlighted content; and (5) permissions controlled via Microsoft 365 Groups. Platforms such as Dock 365 utilize SharePoint functionality to provide contract and vendor management capabilities, with all data stored in Microsoft 365 tenant. 

Wondering how to best use and configure your SharePoint team site to collaborate and communicate with both team members and partners, manage tasks, share reports, track events and much more. This blog post is a  guide to help you better leverage the SharePoint team site. 

What Are SharePoint Team Sites and How Do They Work?

SharePoint Team Sites are purpose-built collaboration hubs within Microsoft 365, designed around a specific team, project, or business unit. Unlike SharePoint Communication Sites - which broadcast content to a wide audience - Team Sites are built for active group collaboration: every member can contribute, co-author documents, and access shared resources. According to Microsoft Learn, team sites created from Microsoft Teams automatically provision a connected SharePoint site with a document library, pages library, and a site mailbox, creating a unified workspace from day one. This connected architecture means that permissions granted in Teams are reflected in SharePoint automatically, reducing administrative overhead and access management errors. For organizations managing large volumes of business documents - from contracts and vendor agreements to operational policies - the team site's shared infrastructure provides a secure, auditable starting point that requires no additional platform investment beyond an existing Microsoft 365 subscription.

Now create group-connected SharePoint team sites in seconds. Unbelievable right? Once you create a group, Office 365 provides the group

• A shared inbox
• Calendar
• OneNote notebook
• Team site document library (a default place files) 
• Planner for task management

And now a modern team site comes with pages, lists, libraries and team news thus enabling a group to collaborate and communicate better.

To create SharePoint team sites connected to Office 365 Groups click the Create site button on the SharePoint home page in Office 365.

As shown in the image above, enter the required information in the two-step creation wizard:

Step 1

• Title of the team site
• Select whether the group will be public or private
• Choose site classification & preferred language
• Click Next

 Step 2

•  Enter the owners and members
• Click Finish

Viola! You are done.

Your site, your brand

Customize the look of your SharePoint site to reflect your brand's values and ethos. Choose one of the default SharePoint themes and customize it as per your requirements by adjusting style and colors and adding logos, videos, slide shows, and more.

• Choose a company theme 
• Use one of the classic experience designs
• Site headers allow adjustment of layout options, logo and background choices
• Site footers allow logo, text and links to be added to the bottom of the pages. 

Easy External Sharing

Most organizations perform work that involves collaborating, communicating and sharing documents with vendors, clients, or customers.Now use the external sharing feature of SharePoint Online to share content with external users. You can control, track and report the sites that can share externally. Depending on your need, let external users access only the files you want them to view, download or share. 

Planner integration

Task management is a crucial everyday business task and it is the most efficient when your team has access to everything it needs in one place. Now manage all your tasks and content in one place, all thanks to the Planner integration.You can use an existing Planner plan or create an entirely new plan directly from within SharePoint. Use the “+New” button to add a Planner plan just like adding a new page, list, library or news.Based on what task information is most relevant to your team, choose between the Planner Board or Charts view to appear on your page. 

Connect your existing team site to a new Office 365 group (groupify)  

Enable your SharePoint team site to leverage the superpowers from other integrated apps using one click to groupify. Transform your existing SharePoint team sites by connecting them to new Office 365 groups. 

Steps 

• Go to the gear icon menu in the upper-right of your site
• From the drop-down menu, click on Connect t New Office 365 Group

Now provide enhanced group capabilities to all team members. In addition to the benefits like using modern pages, lists and libraries already available in your classic sites, connecting your site to an Office 365 group provides benefit from all other shared group-connected apps such as

• Outlook for a group inbox and calendar
• Planner for task management
• OneNote for team meeting notes and much more

What Is the Document Library Feature in SharePoint Team Sites?

The heart of every SharePoint Team Site is its Document Libraries. Every document library is a version-controlled and metadata-driven store of documents: Word documents, PDFs, Excel sheets, PowerPoint presentations, or anything else you would like to save. As per Microsoft Learn, Document Libraries have an option for automatic version history out of the box, meaning every save is going to result in an extra version without needing any further setup. Co-authoring in real-time thanks to Microsoft 365 technology enables several people to work on one Word or Excel document simultaneously, with changes visible instantly to all authors. Metadata columns could be added to describe documents in terms of department, type of contract, status, or anything else important for the organization, providing advanced search and filtering options that go well beyond standard folder structure. Document Libraries are used by Dock 365 Contract Management Solution for storing of executed contracts and amendments along with other documents related to the contract records in the Microsoft 365 tenant.

How Does Team News Work in SharePoint Team Sites?

The Team News web part turns the SharePoint Team Site into an internal communications tool on top of its collaboration capabilities. With access rights, users who own the site or have permissions can create news posts, which are basically pages that contain text, pictures, links, and videos. The news posts are posted to the news feed on the site and are displayed in the SharePoint mobile application, the SharePoint start page, and Microsoft Teams within the SharePoint tab. As per the Microsoft SharePoint platform, the news posts include audience targeting capabilities, allowing us to post certain announcements only for certain user groups and not to the whole site members, which is especially important for large companies where updates should be done department by department but not with the use of email lists. From the point of view of content governance, the news posts are versioned and can be posted after going through the SharePoint approval process.

How Do SharePoint Team Sites Integrate with the Microsoft 365 Ecosystem?

The fact that SharePoint Team Site integrates so tightly with other Microsoft 365 services makes it one of the most appealing platforms to leverage. Once a team site gets connected to a Microsoft 365 Group (which is done automatically as soon as Teams workspace is created), the team members have access to a shared Outlook mailbox, shared calendar, Planner board for tasks, OneNote notebook for notes from meetings, and a Yammer community - everything within the same Microsoft 365 ecosystem. In Microsoft Learn, it is stated that in case of integration, there is no need to set up separate permissions within different services: managing one service means getting the access right for all other connected services. As for the processes involving a lot of documents, like contracts or procurements, for example, then integration allows to get the notifications via Outlook, review the documents in SharePoint, track the approval status in Planner, and discuss terms in Teams. All of this happens within one governed environment. Dock 365 takes integration to another level by adding structured contract and vendor management workflows on top of existing Microsoft 365 infrastructure.

How Can You Customize a SharePoint Team Site with Web Parts?

SharePoint Team Sites utilize modern page design which employs modular web parts such as pre-designed web blocks which can be customized and arranged into pages without having to write a single line of code. Such web parts as the Events calendar, Quick Links, Highlighted Content (it shows dynamically all the documents or pages which meet certain criteria), People (shows profiles of the team members) and Microsoft Forms (a convenient tool for gathering small amounts of information) are available. The Highlighted Content web part is especially useful as the administrator can set it to show the most recent documents, all the documents which have a particular metadata tag or even all the documents or pages which are found by a certain search query. The structure of a page can be saved as a template, therefore the same structure can be used for multiple projects or departments. According to the platform documentation provided by Microsoft, modern pages are totally responsive and work well not only on desktops but also on mobile phones and tablets.

How Do Permissions and Security Work in SharePoint Team Sites?

The SharePoint team sites use an advanced permissions framework based on Microsoft 365 Groups and Azure AD which allows the administrator to set permissions to access, modify, and manage the content of the site. The site level permissions include default groups consisting of owners (with full control), members (edit permission), and visitors (read-only). They may also include item-level or library-level permissions for certain documents where the restriction of the access is required - for instance, restricting the access to contract libraries holding confidential commercial information to legal and financial departments only. As per Microsoft Learn, the external sharing can be turned off or on at the organization and individual site levels which will allow the IT administrator to prevent any access to the sensitive sites while enabling the guests to access the sites created for collaborative purposes. All permission changes, document accesses and modifications are automatically recorded in the Microsoft 365 Unified Audit Log and, for those companies which require compliance or regulatory auditing, it becomes essential – as platforms such as Dock 365 also offer an additional contract-specific activity log.

How Can SharePoint Team Sites Support Contract and Vendor Document Management?

SharePoint Team Sites are the right kind of infrastructure that is needed to manage contracts and vendors. It provides all that you will need for proper contract management like centralized document storage, versioning, permissions, and auditing. But if you want to use generic SharePoint site for your contract management process, then you will need to do quite a bit of work for each step of the contract lifecycle. In order to solve this problem, Dock 365 provides an out-of-the-box contract and vendor management solution built natively in SharePoint and Microsoft 365. Using Dock 365 makes the SharePoint infrastructure that you have become a proper structured CLM solution. Since Dock 365 runs in your Microsoft 365 tenant, you never lose any control over your contract data, which is especially important for lawyers and procurement professionals who have to follow strict data sovereignty laws. Some of the key capabilities of Dock 365 include the ability to organize contracts by business units, programs or categories, and full visibility of costs and risks across all vendors.