Power Automate: Apply Site Template to SharePoint Sites

Article
1/17/2024

Introduction
Out of the Box Templates
Team Site Templates
Custom Site Template
Apply Site Design using Power Automate
Test the flow
Summary

Introduction

Site Templates or Site Designs are a way to apply additional functionality commonly across multiple sites. We can apply it during the site provisioning process or after the creation of a site. Site designs have now been renamed as Site Templates. There are out of the box Site Templates that you can apply to sites and creation of a custom site template/design that applies company branding, theme etc is also possible.

Out of the Box Templates

Some of the Out of the Box Team and Communication site templates available are:

Team site templates	Template ID
Event planning	9522236e-6802-4972-a10d-e98dc74b3344
Project management	f0a3abf4-afe8-4409-b7f3-484113dee93e
Training and courses	695e52c9-8af7-4bd3-b7a5-46aca95e1c7e
Training and development team	64aaa31e-7a1e-4337-b646-0b700aa9a52c
Team collaboration	6b96e7b1-035f-430b-92ca-31511c51ca72
Retail management	e4ec393e-da09-4816-b6b2-195393656edd

Communication site templates	Template ID
Crisis management	905bb0b4-01e8-4f55-b73c-f07f08aee3a4
Department	73495f08-0140-499b-8927-dd26a546f26a
Leadership connection	cd4c26b2-b231-419a-8bb4-9b1d9b83aef6
Learning central	b8ef3134-92a2-4c9d-bca6-c2f14e79fe98
New employee onboarding	2a23fa44-52b0-4814-baba-06fef1ab931e
Showcase	89f21161-0892-497a-91cb-5783eeb1f5f2
Healthcare	5215c092-152f-4912-a12a-7e1efdcc6878
Store collaboration	811ecf9a-b33f-44e6-81bd-da77729906dc
Volunteer center	b6e04a41-1535-4313-a856-6f3515d31999
Topic	a30fef54-a4e5-4beb-a8b5-962c528d753a
Blank	665da395-e0f9-4c92-b35c-773d8c292f2d

Once you go to a communication site, you can view the Apply Site Template Option from Settings.

Clicking on it will open the window from which we can select a template. Same way, for a Team site, you can get another set of available templates

Team Site Templates

Custom Site Template

In case you want to add some specific functionality that needs to be replicated across sites, we can create Custom Site Templates/Designs as well. Laura has written a detailed article of the step by step process to create a Site Design here.

In case you want to get a list of the Custom Site Designs already deployed and available in the tenant we can use the cmdlet : Get-SPOSiteDesign

We can use Power Shell to later apply the site design to a site using the syntax

Invoke-SPOSiteDesign -Identity <SiteDesignID> -WebUrl <WebURL>

Apply Site Design using Power Automate

In this article, we will see how we can apply an Out of the Box and Custom Site Tempate/Design using Power Automate so that in case one do not have access to PowerShell, they can still get the Job done by passing the SiteDesign ID to a Power Automate.

As the first step, we will create a Power Automate with the manual trigger and add two input options :

varSiteURL	Text input	The Site URL where Site Template has to be applied
varSiteTemplateID	Text input	The Site Template ID that has to be used

Once we have the inputs, we will use it to trigger a Send an HTTP Request to SharePoint action where we will have the following inputs used in the action

Parameter	Value
Site Address	varSiteURL input variable
Method	POST
URI	_api/Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.WebTemplateExtensions.SiteScriptUtility.ApplySiteDesign
Body	{ 'webUrl':'@{triggerBody()['text']}', 'siteDesignId': '@{triggerBody()['text_1']}' }

Thus we have easily setup a simple flow that looks like below to apply the site template

Test the flow

Let’s trigger the flow manually by providing the inputs – Site URL and Site Template ID

Where I will provide a newly created communication site URL and the site template ID of a custom site design which I have created. I have retrieved its ID using the Get- SPOSiteDesign cmdlet.