How to create departmental sub sites in O365

You just spun up a new O365 Tenancy and now you need to populate it for the client. ( P1, E1, doesn't matter here. This pertains to all types.)

You are also tasked with creating secured sub sites for the Intranet.

Presume for a moment that you've already had the discussion of what they want for a taxonomy with the SharePoint catalyst at the organization, by catalyst, I mean the Steering Committee, champion or leader.

For instance, they could direct you with " I want an, Admin Site, two Product sites and a Finance site and an HR site"

Ideally, you would want that person to email you an excel that looks like this to allow you to successfully create the new groups and apply the permissions. This could take some time to get, but provide them with this one, empty for them to fill out, and you might get a quick response.

SharePoint Group	Administration Site	Product Line A	Product Line B	Finance	Human Resources
Owners	Steve Doran	Helen Amaral	Debra Murphy	James Financier	Holly Francis
Members	Mindy Loo	Jocelyn McDoon	Katherine Baxter	Jordan McCluskey	James Duby
	Talli Evangelista	Janet Caponata	Brenda Fleming	Heather Klugh	Shah Fariz
		Doral Comeau	Gabriel Lopez
		Ann Comton	Janet Moore
Visitors	All Employees	All Employees	All Employees	nobody	nobody
				nobody	nobody

With that in hand, follow the below steps to create the sub sites:

Log into the site using the admin credentials

Using the Gear icon in the utility area, select Site Contents

Scroll to the bottom of this page and you will see where they hid the link to create a new Sub Site ;-)

Here you can name your subsite and set up security and navigation options
 

You now are asked to populate the new Security Groups.

You can individually add users here, but if you have a lot of users, this can take a long time.

Fortunately you have options.

1.      Windows Azure Powershell - See Blog Post on  'Howto configure O365 user passwords to never expire'

2.      Excel reformatting trick to get names to be able to paste into the People Picker box.

a.      You need to get your usernames in the format of email address or FirstInitial+LastName>

b.      To get that from "John Mongell" pop it into excel, Text to Columns, Space Delimited.

c.      Now take those two rows and split the first on delimited by first character.

d.      Now join that new initial with the last name column and append ";" 

example

After you click OK, your site will be provisioned.

Go back to the TOP LEVEL and do it again for the next site, but be sure to know where you are provisioning from!

 You don’t want to provision a sub site underneath the site you just created if it was supposed to be closer to the top.