SharePoint Pages Instead Of Library Files For Company Guidelines

Organizations that use SharePoint tend to share most of their documents in libraries, and this is often the best way – but not always! In a new Tips article, I suggest a method that uses pages instead of documents. It is less common but quite striking when used on certain kinds of documents. In my demo I use new model pages, but everything that can be done in the new model can also be achieved with wiki pages.

Pages versus documents
Pages can of course only be edited and shared inside SharePoint, so you cannot always use them instead of documents. However, I recommend you to try pages when suitable. Once you get away from documents, you will find that it is easier to both read and edit pages as compared to documents. Furthermore, pages load much quicker than documents and can be more interactive, containing live videos etc.

Company guidelines
Most organizations have documents for company guidelines that should be shared among users. For such documents the page method is suitable, if you want to present the guidelines in a more elegant way than just uploading them to a document library. Therefore I have used a few of these documents as an example in my demo.

Subsite with pages
The page method idea is to create a subsite called Company Guidelines and add the content of each document on a separate page in that site. The page should of course have the same name as the guidelines document.

Custom links
When all pages are added to the subsite, I remove the default links from the Quick Launch. Instead I add links to the pages with company guidelines. This is done in the Site pages library, where I also set one of the pages as the default one.

With a link to the Company Guidelines site in the top navigation, users can easily reach the guidelines, and when the site is open they have all the pages at hand in the Quick Launch.

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions