SharePoint Lookbook: Everything You Need to Know

Quick Links

• What is SharePoint lookbook?

• Where do I find SharePoint templates in the lookbook?

• What kind of templates are available in the SharePoint lookbook?

• Who can create and use lookbook templates?

• How to download Microsoft lookbook templates?

• How to use SharePoint lookbook?

• What are the pros and cons of the Microsoft lookbook?

• How do I make SharePoint online look good?

What is SharePoint lookbook?

SharePoint lookbook is a basic gallery of designs that works great when you need a:

Practice or training site to learn SharePoint

Quick and interactive prototype to show SharePoint to others

A starter site for SharePoint beginners

Where do I find SharePoint templates in lookbook?

You can browse the list of available lookbook templates here: https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-look-book/

You can also see the same templates when creating a brand-new site in SharePoint.

What kind of templates are available in the SharePoint lookbook?

Lookbook gives you some of the most common page templates, including:

• Landing Pages

• Department Sites

• News Sites

• Onboarding Sites

• Learning & Training Sites

• And more

Who can create and use lookbook templates?

You must be able to create SharePoint templates from the lookbook in your tenant.

This required permission is one of the highest access rights in SharePoint Online. If you work for a larger organization, you will need to speak with your IT department to have the site created for you.

How to download Microsoft lookbook templates?

To download and install a lookbook template, follow these simple steps:

1. First, you must be a tenant administrator in your SharePoint Online tenant, as noted above.

2. Select the lookbook gallery template you like by going here: https://lookbook.microsoft.com/

3. When ready, click the [Add to your tenant] button

4. Choose the following:

   a. Email

   b. Site Title

   c. Site URL

5. Click [Provision]

Wait a few minutes and then navigate to the site URL you chose. The template should be ready, just as seen in the picture.

How to use SharePoint lookbook templates?

When you download and install your chosen lookbook template in your SharePoint tenant, you'll immediately have access to a landing page you can edit.

Simply edit the page and add/remove or update apps as needed and preferred.

Here are a few things to remember when working with a sample site from the lookbook:

• Remove all sample pages

  Some templates in the lookbook, such as New Employee Onboarding, come with several sample pages you'll want to remove. Sometimes we see these pages left behind, and employees stumble upon them in search results, thinking it's trusted content when it isn't.

• Replace or remove sample content on the page.

  • This might be obvious, but we've seen customers leave parts of the demo site on the page, confusing to everyone who thinks it's actual content. This includes images of look-alike reports, tasks, and diagrams.

  • Delete sample PowerPoints, documents, and sheets that users might find using search.

• Give site permissions

  Each time you install a lookbook template, SharePoint creates a brand-new site.

  Sites in SharePoint require explicit access; otherwise, no one will see them and be able to use the valuable information. This rule goes for every template you download from the lookbook.

• Delete sites you tried and didn't like

  Since SharePoint makes a new site each time you try out a template, we recommend deleting sites you tried and don't like to avoid confusion with real sites employees will use.

What are the pros and cons of the Microsoft lookbook?

As we shared earlier, the lookbook is excellent for practice/training, showing a prototype to others, and jumping-off points for beginners.

Here is a more detailed Pro/Con list.

Pros:

• It can be installed in minutes

  • That's right! Templates can be installed in your tenant in just under a few minutes. If you need to train your users on using SharePoint, you can quickly create a ready-to-go site in minutes. This is a massive improvement compared to making pages from scratch.

• No code is required to install the site.

  • Anyone can install a template as long as they have permission to do so—no need to hire a developer or write code.

    If you're practicing your SharePoint skills, you will immediately know what is possible to build out-of-the-box without needing to customize anything.

• Ready to click on examples to show your team

  • Instead of showing your team pictures of potential page designs, you can show them working pages.

Cons:

• Limited options for branding and basic design

  • Fixed color combinations

    There are limited color combinations in SharePoint (known as theme colors). This means you can't customize the site and page colors to match your corporate style guide without writing code.

• Fixed font and iconography

  The only font available without writing code in SharePoint is Segoe UI, with fixed sizing and color options. This breaks most of the corporate style guides.

• Image-heavy designs

  When you zoom in on lookbook designs, you'll see many page elements are images. This makes the page look colorful but may lack valuable tools for employees.

• Limited app choices

  Many images in lookbook templates can catch your eye, but as you start adding apps, you may find that your choices are limited and the page looks bland.

• Limited page sections

  SharePoint allows you to break the page into sections. However, you have limited combinations of sections and apps to choose from out-of-the-box.

  Many organizations find these constraints limit their visual design requirements.

• You can't add an individual lookbook page to your existing intranet

  Each SharePoint online lookbook template is a separate site, so you can't selectively copy it if you like just one page. You have to create an entirely new site with that chosen lookbook template. Many companies see it as overkill and a permissions management nightmare.

• Not an intranet template

  Lookbook is not a pre-built intranet; it's a gallery of visual design samples (a collection of standalone pages).

  If you're building an intranet, you'll need to tie these pages/sites into a user-friendly structure so employees can quickly find what they're looking for.

How do I make SharePoint online look good and create an excellent user experience?

Before lookbook was available, each new site you created in SharePoint looked similar to this:

It's great to see that Microsoft built a collection of other examples.

But even with the SharePoint online lookbook:

• 72% of the 200 respondents we surveyed say that look and feel in SharePoint is still a big problem

• Almost all survey respondents say they're building an intranet in-house because they want to stick with SharePoint but worry that adoption will suffer if their intranet doesn't look good.

It's hard for developers to design, and contracting a designer has a risk that that designer doesn't understand the constraints of SharePoint.

Most customers we speak to prefer using a combination of the pre-built SharePoint intranet, templates, and apps, along with in-house resources.

For example, the product we built, ORIGAMI, offers templates and apps to create a beautiful, website-like Office 365 intranet while keeping the solution in-house.

Here are the top 21 capabilities Origami provides on top of the SharePoint out-of-the-box.

Our customers say that Origami helped them improve both visual design and user experience.

Origami provided some innovative options and customizations that SharePoint out of the box could not meet.

Delene Bosch

Project and Porfolio Manager

Origami is aesthetically pleasing compared to other solutions. It comes with ready-to-go SharePoint templates, so you can build an intranet faster with less work.

Oscar Gamboa

Information Technology Manager at Servicon Systems inc.

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is an Enterprise Solutions Architect at ORIGAMI. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.

SharePoint Intranet Solution with Guaranteed Results

SharePoint Intranet with Guaranteed Results

Get a bold and intuitive SharePoint intranet portal that feels like it’s been made just for you.

• Simple and user-friendly design.
• Rock-solid, guaranteed process.
• Above-average user adoption.
• Team of award-winning enterprise architects.

Get in Touch See Examples

SharePoint is one of the best tools to build your company’s intranet.

However, we often hear that the platform is too restrictive and requires customization to:

• Make the design look modern

• Make the search easy

• Integrate with other corporate systems

Above are the top reasons why companies feel they need custom SharePoint development.

According to Nielsen Norman, the best intranets can take an average of 23 months and a team of 17 to build. That’s long and expensive.

In contrast, using an intranet solution, you can reduce development by 9X for a medium-sized organization.

Here is a comparison of alternatives for building your SharePoint intranet.

Will this intranet solution meet my needs?

The best part of using SharePoint intranet solutions is that there is no waiting around for a 2-month design. You can see your design immediately.

Of course, the example designs may not be custom-tailored to your brand, but you’ll see what you’re getting into.

Fun fact: a few of our customers, months before they even reached out to us, have used the examples on our website to mock up their designs!

You’re welcome to do that too.

To help you out, below is a downloadable PDF with our top examples in high resolution.

What if I need to change something?

When intranet solutions first appeared, they were rigid (some still are).

You want a modular SharePoint intranet solution, meaning every major part of the page can be taken out of the page.

This way, you can mix and match parts of the page.

With an intranet solution like that, you can always update functionality on a page when needed.

This is precisely what we do with Origami. When design trends change (and they do), we give customers new tools to update parts of their page at will.

You don’t want a SharePoint intranet portal that tells you what you can and can’t add to the page.

Warranty

One valid question many IT leaders have with any solution is:

“What if Microsoft changes something and it breaks the intranet solution?”

You might hear responses such as “nothing ever breaks” or “we follow best practices, so nothing should ever break.”

That may be comforting but not reassuring.

Our response to that is that we provide a warranty for any defects. It’s that simple.

References: are they as good as they say they are?

Usually, customers want to know these three areas when comparing Origami’s SharePoint intranet in a box with other solutions.

How do we perform during the project?

The implementation process was perfect: the schedule, the project management, and the brainstorming activity. It helped us visualize what we're going to build. Without this process, it would have taken way longer to build our intranet, and we might have created something that is not a fit ... read more

Oscar

IT Manager at Servicon Systems inc.

How is the support post-go live?

Origami has been absolutely fantastic about their support, it's definitely the best support I've ever received from any of the external products that we use ... read more

Ilona

Application Specialist at Wise Group

How is the overall intranet solution?

Best custom intranet out there. I researched several intranet options, and Origami made the use and administration of SharePoint easy, intuitive, and design stunning. Their apps make a more engaging experience for our users ... read more

Kris

EWC Experience

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Creating SharePoint Intranet Governance

Summary: Intranet governance may sound complicated, but it can help you drive engaging content and decrease the burden of maintenance on your IT and Communications teams. What’s included in the initial governance list will depend on which features you’re using on your intranet. In addition to having an initial set of rules, plan to have an ongoing governance review to update the list.

Intranet governance is simply a list of processes along with responsible parties involved.

Let’s say, someone from HR wants to update an expense form template on the intranet.

• Who should do it? Whoever is less busy or a specific person?

• Should we keep an old version?

• Should we let everyone know about the update? If so, how would we communicate this change?

• Is everyone on the HR team aware of how to handle this new template?

• Should anyone approve the template before it’s published?

• What happens if employees have questions about the new template and, who should they contact?

As you can see, without these questions answered there are lots of potential routes. Having governance around templates, in this case, will help everyone on the intranet team understand their roles and who’s accountable for what, and the process to follow.

The alternative is to handle each request in an ad-hoc way, which increases the burden on your resources; in organizations, with > 200 users that’s not even sustainable.

What should the intranet governance document contain?

Avoid generic templates of 100 pages worth of SharePoint governance. These are too general to be useful. They provide a lot of details around out-of-the-box features but nothing related to your organization.

It doesn’t take a lot to create an efficient governance document of a few pages which tackle relevant parts of your intranet.

Here are the key SharePoint intranet governance considerations we see on every intranet project:

• Sites

  • Creating New Generic Content Site & Team Site. If you have several templates on your site such as project sites, ensure you have checklist for those too

    • Naming conventions (Title and URL)

    • Branding

    • Permissions for Readers, Contributors and Owners. Ensure restricted sites have adequate permissions set up

    • Update to Footer Links, if the site lives under 2nd, or 3rd navigation levels

    • Update to other navigation links and apps

• Pages

  • Creating a Page

    • Using WIKI versus Site Page

    • URL and naming conventions

    • Determine apps required for the page in this section

    • If apps require dependencies, add them as needed

  • Layout

    • Which page layout to use for which type of the page

      • [One column with sidebar]

      • [One column]

      • etc.

  • Content and Styles

    • Styles for Headings

    • Styles for normal text

    • Font sizes

    • Embedding rules

  • Home Page (this being the most prominent page it needs strict editing rules)

    • Rules about editing the content on the page

    • Rules about changing the layout of the page

    • Rules related to updating key apps on the home page such as new carousels, links, shout-outs, polls, etc.

  • Landing Pages (these are the second most prominent types of the page; they also need editing rules)

    • Rules about editing the content on the page

    • Rules about changing the layout of the page

• Apps

  • Apps related to the home page and related rules. Such as ‘do not place more than 10 quick links on the page’, or ‘keep naming conventions of the links on the page’

  • Dependencies for specific apps. For example, whether apps require lists and libraries to operate, what are those, and what is the required metadata

  • Image resolutions for apps to best render their pages

• Processes

  • Renaming of sites and pages to avoid broken links

  • Alerts on lists that collect user input

  • Versioning rules

  • Content review process

  • Archiving rules

  • Removing obsolete content

Roles and Responsibilities

An intranet contains content from a variety of sources and being able to find out quickly who is responsible for which content is not always so easy.

Every governance document must contain roles and responsibilities when it comes to key areas of running the intranet, those are:

• Intranet Owners (individuals who own the home page, landing pages, and key areas of the site, they also assign area owners but are not technical users)

• Area Owners (individuals who control specific areas of the site, such as HR; they also assign Area Authors)

• Area Authors (individuals who create content for the area of the site)

• Platform Owners (technical users who monitor and control the platform: Office 365, SharePoint, etc.)

For every area in your intranet information architecture, you need to determine who of the above will have which role, including:

• Who are the key contacts?

• What is the approval process?

• What is the support process?
  
  
  

Governance Committee

The governance committee is the key to ensuring your governance evolves based on the lessons learned and decisions are made quickly to accommodate changes.

To ensure you get the most out of your governance committee, follow these key considerations:

• Have a mechanism to capture issues and feedback.

  • Issues rarely happen randomly, they are likely a pattern or a gap that can lead to more of the same

  • Provide the ability to provide feedback for your users

    • Communicate expected SLA

  • Capture issues in the issues log and determine the patterns

• Prioritize issues and impact (diagram below illustrates how updates can be prioritized)

• Determine updates to your governance

• Communicate governance changes to affected parties: Area Owners, Authors, etc

This chart illustrates how proposed governance updates can be prioritized to determine which ones to tackle next.

Conclusion

The value of governance is its practicality and transparency. The easier it is for everyone to know the process, the less of a burden managing the site will be.

Do you maintain governance plan? What are the challenges you find with it?

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.

@spentsarsky

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How-To: Create modern SharePoint site designs and SharePoint Office 365 site templates

With Office 365 you can create SharePoint site templates so that users can quickly build up their content without having to worry about configuring pages and components on them over and over again.

This technical video below demonstrates how to do that in a few steps.

In this quick how-to video, we look at how you can easily script site template provisioning in SharePoint Online modern communication and team sites.

Links in this video:

• Flat UI Colors

• Theme Builder

• Site Design Schema

Code used in the video:

//------------------------------
// Theme Provisioning

$themepallette = @{
"themePrimary" = "#9b59b6";
"themeLighterAlt" = "#faf7fb";
"themeLighter" = "#f5eef8";
"themeLight" = "#ebdef0";
"themeTertiary" = "#d5b9e0";
"themeSecondary" = "#a569bc";
"themeDarkAlt" = "#8e4ba8";
"themeDark" = "#6e3a83";
"themeDarker" = "#572e67";
"neutralLighterAlt" = "#f8f8f8";
"neutralLighter" = "#f4f4f4";
"neutralLight" = "#eaeaea";
"neutralQuaternaryAlt" = "#dadada";
"neutralQuaternary" = "#d0d0d0";
"neutralTertiaryAlt" = "#c8c8c8";
"neutralTertiary" = "#d6d6d6";
"neutralSecondary" = "#474747";
"neutralPrimaryAlt" = "#2e2e2e";
"neutralPrimary" = "#333333";
"neutralDark" = "#242424";
"black" = "#1c1c1c";
"white" = "#ffffff";
"primaryBackground" = "#ffffff";
"primaryText" = "#333333";
"bodyBackground" = "#ffffff";
"bodyText" = "#333333";
"disabledBackground" = "#f4f4f4";
"disabledText" = "#c8c8c8";
}

Add-SPOTheme -Name "Origami Purple" -Palette $themepallette -IsInverted $false

//------------------------------
//Site Structure Provisioning

$site_script = @'
{
  "$schema": "schema.json",
  "actions": [
    {
		"verb": "applyTheme",
		"themeName": "Origami Purple"
    },
    {
	   "verb": "addNavLink",
	   "url": "/",
	   "displayName": "Employee Services",
	   "isWebRelative": true
	},
    {
	   "verb": "addNavLink",
	   "url": "/",
	   "displayName": "Business Services",
	   "isWebRelative": true
	},
    {
	   "verb": "addNavLink",
	   "url": "/",
	   "displayName": "Workspaces",
	   "isWebRelative": true
	},
	{
    "verb": "setSiteLogo",
    "url": "https://[your logo url].png"
	}
  ],
  "bindata": { },
  "version": 1
}
'@


Add-SPOSiteScript -Title "Origami" -Content $site_script -Description "Creates Origami Site Script"
Add-SPOSiteDesign -Title "Origami" -WebTemplate "68" -SiteScripts "" -Description "Origami Site"


//------------------------------
// Cleanup
Remove-SPOTheme -Name "Origami Purple"
Remove-SPOSiteScript 
Remove-SPOSiteDesign 

If you feel like this video is too technical, you’re not alone.

We’ve been receiving requests from many Communication Managers, Project Manager, and Designers to help them set up their intranet or a site template.

We have created a pre-built SharePoint intranet solution to help you with any customizations or configurations you may need to set up your intranet, below is an example of a modern SharePoint site template available with Origami web parts.

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a Director of Product at Origami. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.

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Branding SharePoint Modern Communication Sites - Adding Corporate Color Themes

In this quick how-to video, we look at how you can apply your own company colors to SharePoint Online modern communication site. I'd call this how-to no code since small amount of code you have to copy is just copy & paste.

Links in this video:

• SharePoint Online Management Shell

• Theme Builder

• Additional Commands and References

• SharePoint Branding

Code used to update the theme:

$themepallette = @{
"themePrimary" = "#eab905";
"themeLighterAlt" = "#fffcf2";
"themeLighter" = "#fef9e4";
"themeLight" = "#fef3ca";
"themeTertiary" = "#fde590";
"themeSecondary" = "#fac810";
"themeDarkAlt" = "#d3a604";
"themeDark" = "#a48103";
"themeDarker" = "#816603";
"neutralLighterAlt" = "#e8dfdf";
"neutralLighter" = "#e5dada";
"neutralLight" = "#ddd0d0";
"neutralQuaternaryAlt" = "#d1bfbf";
"neutralQuaternary" = "#c9b4b4";
"neutralTertiaryAlt" = "#c3abab";
"neutralTertiary" = "#d6d6d6";
"neutralSecondary" = "#474747";
"neutralPrimaryAlt" = "#2e2e2e";
"neutralPrimary" = "#333333";
"neutralDark" = "#242424";
"black" = "#1c1c1c";
"white" = "#ece5e5";
"primaryBackground" = "#ece5e5";
"primaryText" = "#333333";
"bodyBackground" = "#ece5e5";
"bodyText" = "#333333";
"disabledBackground" = "#e5dada";
"disabledText" = "#c3abab";
}

Add-SPOTheme -Name "Origami Yellow" -Palette $themepallette -IsInverted $false

Code to remove the theme:

Remove-SPOTheme -Name "Origami Yellow"

Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is the Director of Product at Origami. He's also 8 time Microsoft MVP, speaker at many local and worldwide tech events, and a published author of several SharePoint related books.

@spentsarsky

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