Request a new SharePoint site or team library

Step-by-step troubleshooting

1. 1

   Decide what the site is for

   A team site suits a department or project that collaborates on files and comes with a Teams team. A communication site suits a read-mostly intranet page — policies, forms, announcements — where a few people publish and everyone reads.

2. 2

   Agree a name and owner

   Names appear in URLs and are hard to change cleanly, so use something durable like Finance or Project-Northbridge rather than a person's name. Nominate two owners so approvals don't stall when one is on leave.

3. 3

   List who needs access, and at what level

   Tell us the members who edit, the visitors who only read, and anyone outside the business who needs access. We create a group per site rather than sharing individual folders, which is what keeps permissions manageable.

4. 4

   Tell us about external sharing

   If clients, contractors or auditors need access we set guest sharing at the site level with expiry, rather than open 'anyone with the link' sharing. Say who and for how long.

5. 5

   Plan the folder structure before you migrate

   Keep it shallow — two or three levels — and avoid # % & { } and very long names, which break sync. Send us the folder list and where the existing files live (a file server, personal OneDrive, Dropbox) and we'll migrate the content and permissions.

6. 6

   Set up access on desktops

   Once created, each member opens the site in a browser, opens the document library and clicks Sync or Add shortcut to OneDrive so it appears in File Explorer or Finder. We can push this out for you.

7. 7

   Confirm retention and backup

   We apply the retention policy and add the new site to Cove Cloud Backup with the rest of your Microsoft 365 data, then confirm the first successful backup back to you.