M365 Changelog: (Updated) Connected Templates

MC312070 – Updated August 17, 2022: Microsoft has updated the rollout timeline below. Thank you for your patience.

Microsoft is announcing the upcoming release of Connected Templates with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. The connected templates will offer a new way of combining Microsoft Teams templates with SharePoint templates. Prior to this integration, clients needed to deploy Microsoft Teams or SharePoint-specific templates.

• Microsoft Team Templates allow administrators to easily deploy consistent teams across their organization using predefined or customized team templates across their organization.
• SharePoint templates offer a straightforward way for admins to build sites with pre-populated pages, page templates, news post templates, and web parts that can be customized to fit the needs of their organization.

Through this integration, Teams administrators can create templates that include SharePoint components, bringing together the capabilities of the Teams and SharePoint templates.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID: 84724

When this will happen:

Microsoft will begin rolling this out in mid-January and expect to complete rollout by mid-October (previously early October).

How this will affect your organization:

Today, when you create a team through “create a team from templates’ you get an automatically created SharePoint site that supports that template. Microsoft is adding SharePoint assets to the team you have just created with this new integration. In essence, all SharePoint applications that are associated with the new template will be automatically added, pinned, and displayed in this new team template.

• When you create a new team using a default template – for example, the “Manage a Project” template, the project management channels and apps, and the connected SharePoint template will get applied automatically. Now, the pages, lists, and Power Platform integrations from SharePoint will be automatically pinned as tabs in Teams and you can edit these pages and lists directly in Teams.

What you need to do to prepare:

You might want to notify your users about this change and update your training and documentation as appropriate.