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Following Sites Feature Of SharePoint

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Overview

With the increase in social media usage, we follow certain people and groups on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Following the people in a group means we would like to get updated on the happenings from them. Once followed, we keep getting all the updates from them about where they checked-in, what they attended, what interests them, and what are they planning for.

We have the "follow" functionality in SharePoint sites also. Now the question is, why do we need to follow the SharePoint site? We can simply remember the SharePoint site URL, bookmark it in the browser, and that should be fine. In this article, we will see what the SharePoint site offers when we start following it.

Listing on SharePoint Home

Once followed, the SharePoint site starts appearing on the SharePoint Home. This helps to organize sites at one place and visit them as needed.

  1. Login to Office 365 site.
  2. Open SharePoint tile (https://[tenant].sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx).
  3. All of the followed sites appear on the home page under the Following section and can be easily navigated from here.
  4. This view will show a list of 5 recent followed sites. Click See all link to see the list of all sites that are followed so far.
  5. Click on the tile of the site and it will open a site in new tab.

Follow site to easily Move or Copy Documents

The Modern Document library view offers an option to easily move or copy the files within or across SharePoint sites. Please refer to my previous article here for more details.

Once you follow the site, it appears in the Move or Copy documents dialog for faster operation and saves you time to search the site.

This dialog shows the recently followed sites. If your target site does not appear here, click Browse sites

The Following sites get preference for Copy or Move operations. In short, for more easy operations with documents start following the site.

Preference in “Save As” from MS Office

The Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) now can be directly saved to SharePoint Online and OneDrive from MS Office application. The followed sites appear in the “Save As” dialog of MS Office applications to easily save the document to SharePoint site or OneDrive.

  1. From your MS Office application, click File > Save As
  2. Click Add a Place
  3. Click Office 365 SharePoint
  4. When prompted, Sign in with your Office 365 credentials
  5. The Save As dialog will show the Following sites
  6. Click the site under the Following dialog, locate the document library and save the file.

This experience works seamlessly with Office 2016.

Search Preference for Followed sites

The followed site content gets high preference in the search results. When we follow a site, office graph marks the content from the followed site more important to the user. A search performed from SharePoint home, Office 365 or Delve shows the content preferences from followed sites.
 

How to follow or unfollow a site

There are multiple ways by which you can follow a site in SharePoint

Option 1 - By default follow created site

Whenever a user creates a site in SharePoint, he by default gets followed to the site.

Option 2 - Follow or unfollow site from SharePoint home

Open the SharePoint home. It lists out all the sites in SharePoint. Click the Star icon next to SharePoint tile to follow or unfollow the site.

  • The hollow star icon indicates unfollowed site, click to follow the site.
  • The filled in star icon indicates followed site, click to unfollow the site.

Option 3 - Follow or unfollow individual site

We can follow or unfollow sites by visiting them individually.

The classic SharePoint site can be followed or unfollowed from the ribbon. The UI looks as below.

The modern SharePoint site can be followed or unfollowed from the ribbon. The UI looks as below.

Summary

Following a site in SharePoint helps to perform certain activities with ease. Follow the frequently used sites to speed up the interaction.