SharePoint Lookbook: What’s happened to it?

There has been a lot of confusion about what’s happened to the SharePoint Lookbook. I’ve found myself explaining the story to many people, so I thought capturing it in a blog post might be helpful: if only so I can refer people to it instead of typing again.

If you weren’t familiar with the Lookbook, it provided a set of site examples which a Tenant Admin could automatically deploy into a tenant. It gave some excellent examples of how you might solve specific business needs with SharePoint sites. I always recommended that the examples be used as exactly that: examples of the building blocks you could use to build your own sites. The examples probably wouldn’t perfectly solve your business needs, but they gave very detailed information about how you might go about it.

Most of the examples included:

• The ability to instantiate the example in your tenant with a few clicks
• Details of any site features used in the example
• Detailed information about what Web Parts were on each page and how they were configured
• Descriptions of any custom lists or libraries included with the example

Here’s a screenshot from the example entitled The Perspective:

Microsoft decided to shut down the Lookbook site, which was at lookbook.microsoft.com, in June, 2024. The reasons for this aren’t important, really, but they were valid on some level.

The old URL no longer works, but some of the basic information has moved into the SharePoint Look Book – Microsoft Adoption. This is on the Microsoft Adoption site and is a skinnied down version of what we used to have in the Lookbook. We also can’t provision anything directly: it’s now truly just examples, and with a bit less depth.

Through the wonders of the World Wide Web, though, we can still see the old Lookbook in all its glory – but without the functionality – in the last successful crawl from the Wayback Machine from June 9, 2024: SharePoint provisioning service (archive.org)

To me, the worst part of this is that Microsoft Learning Pathways is now harder to deploy. No more one-button-push for a Global Admin, but there are manual deployment steps which a SharePoint Admin (less permission required!) can take. We recently did an Ask Sympraxis about this: New features: Microsoft 365 SharePoint Learning Pathways v5 (sympraxisconsulting.com) Yes, there’s a new version of Learning Pathways (v5), and a new way to deploy it (which was always another way to do it, but more labor intensive). If you need a hand with that deployment, Sympraxis offers a Microsoft 365 Jumpstart to get you up and running.

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What will you miss most about the old Lookbook?