Enforcing your communications site using group policy management

Enforce your default company-wide communications site using GPO

Creating a SharePoint site to use for company communications is a great way to get an out-of-the-box intranet setup quickly if you are using Microsoft 365 in your organisation. It may seem very basic when compared to other CMS platforms such as WordPress or Drupal in terms of functionality and integrations (if you come from a web CMS or developer background) but as a simple communications site which your staff and users can update themselves and which integrates with your existing Microsoft 365 services it’s a great alternative and quick and easy to setup. Once you have your site created though you want to make sure everyone refers to it daily and the best way to do this is to set it as the default homepage for all staff using the Group Policy Manager on your server.

Create the site

Create the SharePoint site in the SharePoint Admin Center (either using one of your existing Microsoft Teams/groups or by creating a completely new team or communication site). I created a new Communication Site to use as a company-wide intranet which would have few content authors but many site visitors.

Note: I gave the intranet site I created the URL [COMPANYNAME].sharepoint.com/sites/FAQs as I already had a main SharePoint site for something else under the URL [COMPANYNAME].sharepoint.com and I wanted this URL to automatically forward to the new company-wide intranet site in case anyone typed in that address. The way I got this to work was simply by creating a news link on the main site with the URL to the new SharePoint site, and then setting that news link as the homepage. This meant that when anyone typed in the URL [COMPANYNAME].sharepoint.com they would get the news link on that page which would then automatically forward them to [COMPANYNAME].sharepoint.com/sites/FAQs.

After setting up the site and picking a theme don’t forget to adjust the site permissions (you can also do this in the SharePoint Admin Center) You can setup specific permissions so that ‘site visitors’ can read-only and ‘site members’ can edit (or you can setup relevant security groups for more access controls).

Next you can start creating pages and populating the navigation menu. I created the following structure for our intranet site:

  • Home
  • About Us
    • History
    • Our Services
    • Meet the team
    • Map of the building
    • Explore the local area
    • Partners (list of tenants)
  • Health & Safety
    • Fire Evacuation
    • First Aid & Defibrillator
    • Safeguarding
    • Report an Incident
    • Safe Working
  • How To Guides
    • Printing & Scanning
    • Phones
    • Youmanage HR
    • Office 365 Overview
    • Outlook and Calendars
    • Microsoft Teams
    • Microsoft Forms (making online forms)
    • SharePoint (managing files)
    • OneDrive (syncing files)
    • Shifts in Teams
    • Yesplan (room bookings)
  • Handbooks
    • Reception Handbook
  • Resources
    • Policies & Handbooks
    • Forms & Templates
  • FAQs

The how-to guides section I populated with my own guides on using various every-day systems our staff needed to use including screenshots with pointers and explanations.

Group Policy

The next step is to setup group policies using the Group Policy Management Console on your domain controller. For info I did this on Windows Server 2019 so the specific instructions may differ slightly depending on your setup but the principles should remain the same.

To set your new SharePoint intranet site as the default homepage for all PCs in your domain you need to setup a group policy object. Depending on your setup you may first need to download the definitions for the browsers you use so they show up in Group Policy Manager (we used Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge).

You can do this by downloading the appropriate ADMX files and installing them (which will copy them into the Policy Definitions folder on the server – specific instructions/locations can be found at the download links for the policy definition files which at the time of writing this were at the following links but can be searched for on the respective websites for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge).

On the domain controller open the Group Policy Management Console and create a new GPO in your domain by expanding it in the tree on the left (I right-clicked on the OU that all our Active Directory users are in and chose ‘Create a GPO in this domain, and link it here’). Right-clicking on your new GPO and choosing ‘Edit’ will then take you into the Group Policy Management Editor where you can edit the settings. In the editor window expand ‘User Configuration’ and then ‘Policies’ and ‘Administrative Templates: Policy Definitions’ (the new policy definitions should show up but if they don’t you may need to right-click on the administrative templates folder and choose ‘Add/Remove Templates’ and then browse to the locations you saved them). Then under the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge settings you can setup the default homepage among other things. The settings I enabled are below but the locations above may vary slightly depending on your server version.

Google Chrome

Startup, Home page and New Tab page:

  • Use new tab page as homepage
  • Configure the homepage URL (add the intranet URL into here)
  • Configure the New Tab page URL (add the intranet URL into here)
  • Action on startup (set to ‘Open a list of URLs’)
  • URLs to open on startup (click ‘show’ and add the intranet URL into here)
  • Show homepage button on toolbar

Microsoft Edge

Startup, Home page and New Tab page:

  • Set the new tab page as the home page
  • Configure the home page URL
  • Configure the new tab page URL
  • Action to take on startup
  • Sites to open when the browser starts
  • Show homepage button on toolbar

PCs in your domain should now apply these settings at the next restart. Whenever anyone opens either Chrome or Edge your intranet site should automatically load, and whenever they open a new tab or window or click the ‘home’ button in the browser it should also default to your intranet site. This way you can make your new SharePoint site the central hub of your organisation for news and information and there are no excuses for staff not seeing it!

Note: If you need to force the update before restarting a PC you can do this by going to the PC and opening either PowerShell or Command Prompt and typing:

gpupdate /force