SharePoint Site Designs and Scripts – Part 2

In the firs part of this blog series, we saw how site designs and scripts are created. This post describes how the access to site designs can be controlled and how the default designs can be customised.

By default, site designs are available to everyone. Access to site designs can be controlled and restricted to a group of users. This useful feature can be used in situations where a certain group of users requires additional configuration with their sites. For example, the HR department may need additional content types for policies and procedures in their document libraries.

The access to site designs can be controlled by using PowerShell cmdlets. There are currently 3 cmdlets used for granting, viewing and revoking rights to a site design:

Grant-SPOSiteDesignRights – grants rights to user or group

Get-SPOSiteDesignRights – used to view rights assigned to a site design

Revoke-SPOSiteDesignRights – revokes access to a site design.

Currently, only mail-enabled security groups and individual users accounts can be used with those cmdlets. Microsoft is planning to add a support for Office 365 Groups in the future.

SharePoint Online provides users with an option to select from a list of predefined site templates already available in O365. To take a full control over the provisioning experience and to ensure all sites within an organisation are created in a consistent manner, the default site designs can also be customised. This can be achieved by using -IsDefault switch with the Add-SPOSiteDesign. When used with the Communication Site template, Topic, Showcase and Blank site designs can be updated with a new site design.

The out-of-the box settings can be restored by using Remove-SPOSiteDesign cmdlet.

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