SharePoint Team Site Home Pages Get New Names – For Some Reason

Today I noticed something that threw me for a loop. I created a garden variety Team Site and saw that the home page was named CollabHome.aspx. Home pages have been named Home.aspx in SharePoint forever.

I did some searching and came up with nothing for “CollabHome.aspx”. One would thing there would be something documented about a change like this, but no. As I usually do, I turned to Twitter to try to find out why this had happened.

I just created a standard Team Site using the Standard Team template (simplest), and the home page was set to /SitePages/CollabHome.aspx. When did that start to happen? No bueno. Tried it twice to be sure. @susanhanley @EEMancini

— Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc) November 3, 2023

I always want the simplest starting point, as it’s better to me to build what we actually want than to start with a template that isn’t exactly right and probably doesn’t follow good information architecture (IA) rules. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Microsoft.) Now that we are forced to choose a template, I choose Standard team. There’s no option to choose “No template, thank you very much.”

Our pal Cathy Dew (@catpaint1) let us know some of the reasoning in a response.

Yes, we do give each homepage a unique name now because site templates are additive as @susanhanley mentioned. This helps you understand which homepage is from which template you applied if you apply a second at a later time.

— Cathy Dew (@catpaint1) November 3, 2023

For years, some of us have been telling people not to change the name of the site home page. It’s good – at least in my mind – to have consistency. Maybe it’s because I type URLs into the address bar more than most people, but consistency is rarely a bad thing. When I see a tenant where the home pages have all been renamed, it’s almost an indicator that the rest of the IA is likely to be messy.

Since the template we choose determines the home page name, I created a site with each of the templates to see what we get. Unfortunately, the home page naming isn’t that consistent, either. I hear they may clean this up a bit, but if you already have a site with one of these names, it’s likely to stay with the name it has.

Template name	Home page
Standard team	CollabHome.aspx
Crisis communication team	crisisCommunicationHome.aspx
Employee onboarding team	Employee-onboarding-team-home.aspx
Event planning	EventPlanHome.aspx
IT help desk	ITHelpdeskHome.aspx
Project management	ProjectHome.aspx
Retail management team	RetailManagementHome.aspx
Store collaboration	SCHome.aspx
Training course	TrainingHome.aspx
Training design team	LearningTeamHome.aspx

I’m not wild about this change at all. At the very least, I’d like a default “No template” option that gives me exactly the same thing I’ve always gotten. Standard team seems to be that, albeit with its home page named CollabHome.aspx. It feels sort of like one of those Hippocratic Oath things: “First do no harm”. A change for change’s sake with no clear benefit is not a good thing.

Is this going to cause huge damage? No. Should I be annoyed or just accept it? Well, maybe the latter. But I see too many changes in SharePoint that erode the power it’s already had for years in the home of something new. It’s not just me being a curmudgeon (which I proudly am!), but also me hoping the best for this platform now and in the future.

ADDENDUM: if you don’t see this in your tenant yet, it may not have reached you. As I understand it, this is rolling out slowly.