Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today I want to show you how you can use Microsoft SharePoint. First off, what is Microsoft SharePoint? It’s a place you go to work with others and also to stay informed. OK, but what does that actually mean, and what can you do with SharePoint? With SharePoint, you can set up an intranet site for your team, basically a web page for your team and you could customize it without needing to know any coding. You could set up a document repository, so you can upload a file to your SharePoint site, and then everyone on your team will have access to that file. You could have shared calendars. You can create lists, and everyone can contribute to that list, and you could also publish news posts to keep your entire team informed. It does quite a bit. There are two different types of SharePoint sites. You have team sites and also communication sites, and we’ll walk through what some of those differences are. All right, why don’t we jump on the PC and first off let’s look at how we can get SharePoint. To be able to get SharePoint, you need either a work or school Microsoft 365 account. Here I’ve logged into office.com and over on the left-hand side, I see all of my app icons. Right down here, I can click on this icon to navigate to SharePoint. Also up above, if I click on the app launcher, here too, I’ll see all of my different apps and I can navigate to SharePoint from here as well. I could access the app launcher regardless of where I am in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. This drops us on this SharePoint start page and up in the top left-hand corner, I can create a new site. This isn’t something that you’re going to do all that often, but in a moment, we’ll create a SharePoint site to show you how that works. To the right of that, I can create a news post if I want to announce something to the organization. Right here in the center of the page, I can see news from all of the different SharePoint sites that I’m a member of. This aggregates all of the news across all of the different sites. Now I’m in the middle of a tutorial, so I don’t have time to read up on these articles, but this one on new benefits looks interesting, so I could save this for later, and it adds it to my reading list over here on the left-hand side. This makes for some good nighttime reading. You’d be surprised at how much entertaining information is in these different news posts. Down below, I also see all of my frequent sites that I interact with. I can navigate back to those sites by clicking on the text right here and down below, I can see all of the latest activity from these sites. If there’s a site that I want to make sure I don’t miss out on and that I could easily get back to, I can click this star, and it’ll add it to my following list. Right underneath the following list, I also see all my recent sites, just as another easy way to get back to those sites. Now the marketing team has been asking me for a SharePoint site so they could work better together as a team, so let’s go ahead and click on create site. This opens up a pane on the right-hand side and we have a choice to make. We can set up either a team site or a communication site. What is the difference and why would you use one verse the other? Well, with a team site, like the name implies, this is where a team comes together to work. This is where you’ll share files, you’ll share a calendar, you’ll work on the same set of tasks. With a communication site, on the other hand, this is what you use to broadcast information out to many. An example is maybe a corporate news site, or maybe the HR team is publishing out information about benefits. That’s when you’d want to use a communication site. For our marketing team, they want to work together as a team, so I’ll click on team site. On the next screen, I need to define the details of my new team site. At the top, I can type in my site name. I’m going to call this the Kevin Cookie Company or the KCC Marketing Team. Down below, I see that it also sets up a group e-mail address for me. With a group e-mail address, whoever is part of this team site, we’re going to have a shared inbox, a calendar, a planner, and a OneNote that we can all collaborate on. I also have a site address, so my team can easily navigate to this site. Down below, I need to type in a site description. I typed in a quick description. Under that I can also set the privacy settings. At the Kevin Cookie Company, we’re a very transparent and open organization. I’ll set the privacy settings to public so anyone can access this SharePoint site. For the language, I’ll just leave it set to English, and then click on next. Next, I can add some additional owners for this site. I don’t have that much time to manage all the nitty gritty details of this new site, so I’ll add Nester on my team to be a co-owner with me. I could also add some additional members, but for now, I’ll leave it as is and click on finish. This drops me on my brand-new SharePoint site for the Kevin Cookie Company marketing team and it really isn’t that hard to create a SharePoint site. What takes a lot longer is making your SharePoint site look good. This is just a bare bones page. First, I want to orient you to what we see here on the page. Over on the left-hand side, I have my navigation. Up here I could create new types of content and right here is the core of the page. I see these different widgets or what SharePoint refers to as web parts. I have news, quick links, and activity, and documents. Now I could add additional ones and I’ll show you in a moment how you can do that. One of the top uses of SharePoint is to upload files and to share them with your team, and I want to share out a Publisher flyer that I created with the marketing team to hopefully drive some inspiration. To upload a new document or file to SharePoint, you could simply drag and drop the file over. This has now uploaded my new document. To see all of the documents that I have stored on this SharePoint site, I can click on see all up here or I could go over on the left-hand side, and click on documents, and I could also click on site contents, and here, too, I could also click into documents. There’s no shortage of ways to get back to the files that I’m sharing with my team. Here I see my Publisher flyer right here for the marketing team to access. To navigate back to the home page, I can click on home, or I can click on this icon for the marketing team and that’ll bring me back to the home page. I want to help the marketing team get their creative juices flowing and really brainstorm some great ideas for marketing campaigns for the Kevin Cookie Company. I’ve always found that the best way to brainstorm ideas is to simply create a list. Let’s create some new content within this SharePoint site. Once again, to create new content, I’ll go up to this new menu. Let’s click on that and I’m going to click on list. This opens up a prompt on the right-hand side, and I’ll type in the name marketing ideas. I’ll leave the description blank for now, and I could select whether to show this as part of the insight navigation, so I can have it show up here on the left-hand side. I want the marketing team to have easy access to this, so I’ll leave that box checked, and then click on create. This now drops me in a new list and anyone who’s part of this SharePoint site can contribute to the list. I’ll add a few items here to get things started. I’ve started creating my list and I put down some of the marketing ideas that I’m most confident about. I know very strongly that airplane banners work very well. A Super Bowl commercial, you don’t have to say anything else, and we’ve been getting a lot of traffic from YouTube tutorial influencers. I’m not sure who they are, but I know it’s working well so we should really double down on that. There are also billboards and newspaper ads. I’m not sure how well they work, but let’s see what else the team comes up with. I’ve kicked off the list here and hopefully the team contributes some more great ideas. Once again, I want to return to the home page, so here I’ll go over to the left-hand navigation and click on home. To make it as easy as possible for the marketing team to contribute their ideas to the list, I want to show the list right here on the homepage of the SharePoint site. Luckily, it’s very easy to customize this page. Up in the top right-hand corner, I have the option to edit this page. Let’s click on that. This opens up the editing interface and I can now add new web parts to my page. I could also remove items from my page. I can customize what this all looks like. I want to add my list to this page so I’ll hover over where I want to add it and here I see a plus icon appear. Let me click on this. This opens up a dialogue and I could see all the different possible web parts that I can incorporate into this SharePoint site. To see things better, let’s expand this dialogue. With the dialogue expanded, you can see that I could insert things as simple as text or images. I could insert a map webpart and as we go down here, I see the list option, but I could also insert Yammer conversations, a Twitter feed, a Planner, a Power BI dashboard. There’s a wide variety of web parts that I can insert into my intranet site to customize it for my needs. Now I want to insert a list, so I’ll go up to search here and I’ll type in list. Here I see the option for a list webpart. Let’s click on this. This inserts a new webpart onto my SharePoint site and here I could select the list that I want to include as part of this webpart. I only have one list and it’s the one that I just created for marketing ideas. Let’s select this one. This pulls in the marketing ideas directly on the marketing team’s home page. Now I would expect that by having this list front and center, the marketing team will come up with some fantastic ideas. With the holidays coming up, lots of people on the marketing team indicated that they’re going to be taking some time off and I’m definitely supportive of that. So, I want to add some type of form where people can enter their name and also the dates for when they’re going to take time off. For this, I’ll insert another Web Part. Here again I can hover over where I want to insert it and I see the plus icon again, so I’ll click on this. Here I want to insert a form, so I’ll type in form, and I see an option for Microsoft Forms. Let’s click on this. Here I have the option of creating a new form or adding an existing form. I don’t yet have this form, so I’ll click on new form. For this form, I’ll type in a quick name. This will be our vacation tracker. Next, let’s click on create. This opens up Microsoft Forms where I could type in the details of my form. I’ll quickly create a tracker. I’ve entered three questions. I want the person’s name, when does your vacation start, and also when does your vacation end. My form is now all set so I’ll go back to SharePoint, and I can set it to collect responses and show the form results. I want it set to collect responses. Next, I’ll click on OK. This now brings my form directly onto my SharePoint home page. As you can see you can bring in all sorts of different content leveraging web parts on SharePoint. I’ve now started adding a little bit of content to my SharePoint site and it’s really starting to take shape. I can also reorganize things if maybe I want something in a different position. Here I have our documents at the very bottom and I think people might miss it. I could simply click on this web part and I could drag it wherever I want it on the page. I’ll put it above this vacation tracker, so maybe people won’t be as likely to take vacation. We don’t have that much staff at the company, so I want people working hard. I know maybe not the best management move, but we’re really trying to grow this company. Now that I’ve made changes, and I’ve added a few new web parts, I’m feeling pretty good about this page. Once I’m all done with my edits, I can click on republish up here, and all my changes will now be available to our marketing team to access. Here now I see the new marketing team SharePoint site and I see all of my changes have taken effect. The Kevin Cookie Company is a fast-growing organization and we’re hiring a lot of people on our marketing team. I mentioned before that we’re somewhat short staffed. As we bring new members on board up here in the top right-hand corner, I can click on members and I can add additional people to this SharePoint site. Right now, I have me and Nestor down as owners, but I can add other people as members if they aren’t going to have write access, but for now, I’m OK just leaving the two of us, but good to know in case I need to add people in the future. I’m really trying to help our marketing team become a really high performing team, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about Microsoft Teams helping with real time communication and collaboration. Down here in the left-hand corner, I can create a team based on this SharePoint site. Let’s try doing that and let’s click on create a team. It’s now successfully created a team. Let’s click on this link to navigate to the new Microsoft Team. This now creates a new team in Microsoft Teams for the marketing team and I have a general channel. If I want to make it easy for the marketing team to get back to our SharePoint site, up here on the top tab bar, I can click on this plus icon, and I can type in SharePoint. I can add a new SharePoint page. When I click on add, here I see the new home page that I just created for the marketing team. I’ll select that and then click on save. This adds our new SharePoint home page for the marketing team directly into Microsoft Teams, and here you could see all of the content, including our list, the documents, and the vacation tracker that I just customized and it’s all easily accessible right here. If I really want to drive home the usage of this marketing ideas list, I can also add the list directly to the top tab bar here within Microsoft Teams. Once again, let’s click on the plus icon and let’s click on SharePoint. This again opens up the SharePoint dialogue, but instead of adding a page, I can add a list. Let’s click on lists. Here I see my marketing ideas list. I’ll click on this and then save it. Now the marketing team might be annoyed by this because I’m really pushing this list, but I think this is the best way to generate some rich ideas. The integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint runs deep. When I click on files within the general channel, this shows me all of the files that have been uploaded on this channel. I’m going to upload the Kevin Cookie Company template and I’m uploading this in Teams, but it’s not actually stored in Teams, it gets stored in SharePoint. I’ve now finished uploading the file and you see it appear here within the file view of the general channel. When I jump back to my SharePoint site, remember how earlier we saw our documents by clicking on documents on the left-hand navigation? When I click on documents, here I see the original flyer that I uploaded, but now I see a new folder for the general channel in Teams. When I click into this, here I could see all of the files that are associated with that channel in Microsoft Teams. They’re all stored here in SharePoint. I think the marketing team is off to a good start and now I want to shift gears and show you how you can set up a communication site. It’s very similar to a team site with a few key differences. Up in the top left-hand corner, once again, let’s click on create site. This opens up a dialogue on the right-hand side. This time let’s click on communication site. Once again, a communication site is for broadcasting out to a large number of people. Let’s click on communication site. Within communication site, I can choose a design and I could also type in a site name. When I create a communication site and I type in a site name, here it’ll give me a site address. One of the key differences though is I don’t get a group e-mail address. We don’t have a shared inbox. We don’t have a shared calendar. We’re not working together as a team. Instead, I’m publishing out this page for people to consume information so there are a few key differences. Once you’re done selecting all the different options, click on finish. This now drops me in a new communication site and it’s very similar to a team site. If I want to edit the look and feel of my communication site, just like we did before, I can click on this edit icon in the top right-hand corner. This drops me in edit mode and with the Kevin Cookie Company we’re opening a new location in Shanghai soon and I want to make sure we include that great news on our communication site. Within edit mode, I can scroll down a little bit and over on the left-hand side I see a plus icon, or I can hover over to add a new section or a new web part. Let’s click on this. Next, I want to add a countdown timer to the opening of our new location. For this, I’m going to search for countdown and here I see a countdown timer web part. Let’s click on that. I’ve now added a timer and I can add a title to my timer. Once I type in a title, I can also type in a description. I typed in a description and we’re not opening in just 23 hours. I would be extremely stressed out if it was coming up that soon. To edit the timer, over on the left-hand side, I can edit the web part by clicking on the edit icon. Let’s click on that. This opens up a pane on the right-hand side and I can choose the date for when the grand opening is occurring. Let me click on this and select the date on the calendar. Along with setting the time, I can also set a call to action, but I don’t need that right now, so I’ll toggle this off. I do want to add a background image though, so I’ll click on add. This opens up a dialog where I can choose an image. I don’t have any images on hand, so over on the left-hand side, I’ll select stock images. Within stock images, I’m going to search for Shanghai to see what comes up, and here’s some awesome pictures of the city. I really like this one in the middle. I’ll select that and then insert it. I have a few other settings for how I want this image to appear, but I think this looks pretty good. I’ll close out this pane. Now that we’ve included a timer, I want to make a few other customizations to this page, and it’s extremely easy to make customizations. Here I can simply scroll up and click on the section that I want to edit. Here once again I click on the edit web part icon, and this opens up a pane over on the right-hand side showing me my different options. Now, right now we’re showing a ton of pictures up here and maybe I’ll cut it down a little bit, so we don’t show quite as many. I’ll just go with four tiles, and now that all looks good, and I’ll close this. Along with editing individual web parts, I can also edit the entire look of a section. Here over on the left-hand side, I can click on the edit section icon, and right now I have it set to a one column layout. I could set it to two columns and here you see that it changes the entire section to two columns. I could also set the section background. There’s lots of customizability to make the communication site look exactly how I want it to appear. Now that I’ve set it to two sections, I want to add an additional web part in this column, and we found out who the YouTuber is who’s been publishing about the Kevin Cookie Company, and we want to show his Twitter feed here. I’ll click on the plus icon and here I can type in Twitter to add the Twitter web part. Once I add the Twitter web part, I can type in the Twitter username right up here. I could set some other settings here, but I’ll leave the default for now, and here I see the Twitter feed appear. Now every time this guy Kevin talks about the Kevin Cookie Company, we’ll be able to follow his latest video. Along with being able to go in and modify web parts and also the overall section look and feel, I could also change the overall page look and feel. Up above on the top header, there’s a settings gear. Let’s click on this. Within here there’s the option to change the look. Let’s click on that. Within change the look, I can modify the theme. If I want to go with a different theme, I could also change the header. Right now, I’m set to a standard header but let me try compact instead. I could also modify the navigation and the footer. For now, all of the defaults look good, but there’s no shortage of ways to customize what your SharePoint site looks like. Along with being able to navigate what the page looks like, up here, I have the top-level navigation. I want to add an additional link here. I can click on this edit link and I can add in an additional site wherever I want in this lineup. I’ll click on the bottom and add a link to our YouTube influencer, Kevin. Once I type in all the details, I’ll click on OK. I now have a new link appearing in this list, and when I click on save, I’ll now see that there is an additional link appearing on top of the page, so I truly can customize just about everything. Once I’m all done making my edits, I’ll go over on the right-hand side and click on republish. This will now make the site available to everyone in our organization. To see who has access to my site, I can go up to the settings gear in the top right-hand corner and click on that. There’s an option for site permissions, and when I click on this, I can see who the site owners are, who the site members are. Currently everyone in our company has access except for external users and we could also share out the site if we want to drive more people to visit our communication site. With the launch of our Shanghai location coming up, I want to make sure everyone in the company knows about it. Over on the left-hand side, I can click on new and let me create a new news post about it. This opens up a dialogue. I’ll start with a blank template and then click on create post. Just like with building out SharePoint sites, I can build a news post in a very similar way. Here I could add different web parts, I could add different text, different images. It’s super easy to build your own content. Let me add some content quickly. I’ve typed in some text for our news article, and once I’m ready to publish out, I can click up here on post news. This now posts the news out to our organization and on the SharePoint home page, you can now see the news there and it also distributes it to the SharePoint mobile app, and to the office.com home page. Today in this tutorial, I showed you a whole bunch of ways of how you can customize your SharePoint homepage to make it look extremely beautiful and amazing. However, sometimes you need some inspiration. There’s a website, lookbook.microsoft.com, and it shows you a whole bunch of different SharePoint site designs to help inspire you to create something that looks amazing for your organization. All right, well that was a quick look at how you can get started using SharePoint. If you now know how to get started, please give this video a thumbs up. To see more videos like this in the future, hit that subscribe button. If you want to see me cover any other topics on this channel, leave a comment down below. All right, well that’s all I had for you today, I hope you enjoyed, and I hope to see you next time. Bye.