M365 – SharePoint Online – Automatic updating modern home pages for classic team sites OR Preventing the automatic migration

Hi All,

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 🙂 Today, one more news, related to automatic update of OOB classic site home page to modern page.

This is very important point to discuss with the customers, where in there tenants large number of classic sites are. So that customer can further discuss with the users so they wont be surprised when this automatic upgrade will happen.

Lets discuss in details.

Details:

• On 14 Jan 2020 Microsoft has added this feature to M365 roadmap.
• Microsoft will automatically update the home pages of classic team sites if those are not customized and meet with following criteria :
  • Sites created with template “STS#0”
  • Home page name should be “Home.aspx” in any language
  • “ModernizeHomepageOptOut” feature is not activated
  • No custom master page
  • Classic Publishing feature should be turned off
• No customization means ? – Page is not modified / updated once it created. That means it have only following OOB default web parts as shown in below Fig1
  • Getting started with your site
  • Site Feed / Newsfeed
  • Documents

• Classic sites those have home page customized will not be migrated automatically
• One more important point is – This migration wont create the Office 365 Group.
• Site collection Administrator can revert back the changes. To revert back the changes there will be link appear in left navigation

Preventing updation of classic site home page to modern page: There are couple of options

• One simple way is to just add any OOB / custom web part on the page so that page is get customized and wont get migrated
• We have PnP PowerShell cmdlet available – “Enable-PnPFeature” , by enabling the following feature we could prevent the site being updated

Enable-PnPFeature -Identity F478D140-B148-4038-9CB0-84A8F1E4BE09 -Scope Web

• Also we can get the list of sites will get affected by running “SharePoint Modernization Scanner” in “HomePageOnly ” only mode. This command will output .CSV file having all the sites which will updated. Then we can inform the users.

References:

• Microsoft 365 Roadmap
• Transform classic pages to modern pages
• Classic home page modernization
• Enable-PnPFeature