1. What exactly is a SharePoint home site ?

A SharePoint home site is a communication site that is designed and designated to serve as the top portal in an organization. A communication site with some extra superpowers, so to speak

2. How do I get a SharePoint home site ?

A SharePoint tenant admin can designate any communication site, built to be the landing page for your organization, to be the Home site. Initially it will be a simple powershell experience and will soon be added to the modern SPO admin portal.

3. What is special about a Home site?

Setting up a home site

– Automatically marks the news from that site as organizational news

– Automatically configures search in that site to be tenant wide

– Creates a shared branding with the SP start page

– Enables a special SP mobile app experience for that site

– ..more such unique experiences to be rolled out in the near future

4. Can there be multiple SharePoint home sites?

a) For now we only support one per tenant, but we’d like to hear about your scenarios requiring multiple top level portals

5. What is the difference between a hubs and home site?

a) Hubs and Home sites are added functionalities to our two modern site types Team and Communication.

A hub is used organize sites with a shared theming, navigation, search and news roll ups.

A home site serves as the top level portal with unique functionality like special SP mobile treatment, organizational news, tenant wide search, integration with SP start page, etc.

6. Can a home site be a hub as well?

a. Absolutely ! Check it out in the Microsoft Sites and Intranet booth at SPC

7. Isn’t there a SharePoint home already ?

a. Its now the SharePoint start page. It’s the OOB SharePoint page powered by graph intelligence available for all users . It’s a personalized way finding and resources tool and it will continue serving its purpose. SharePoint home site, on the other hand, is an organization’s top portal. It’s a carefully crafted collection of news, content, conversations and video to deliver an engaging experience that reflects an organization’s voice, priorities and brand.

8. When can I get SharePoint home sites ?

a. We are targeting Q3 time frame for starting roll out.

Home sites are natively responsive, so you can rest assured that every page will be beautiful, fast, and accessible on any device.  Coming later this year, a dedicated home button will allow one touch access to your home site in the SharePoint mobile app.  You can also configure your company logo in the Office 365 navbar to link to your home site. Doing this means your home site will always be one click away in any of the Microsoft 365 web applications.