How to create a Microsoft Sharepoint Site and Group for communications with students, faculty, and staff

To communicate with a specifically defined set of K-State faculty, staff, students or a mix, you can create a Microsoft Group and that allows a way to make a very visual set of pages with media, files, text, etc and you can directly email all the people in the Group called a Sharepoint site.   You can maintain these pages, send notifications of changes, and easily keep the group updated with changing membership using eID/email address.

To communicate with a specifically defined set of K-State faculty, staff, students or a mix, you can create a Microsoft Group and that allows a way to make a very visual set of pages with media, files, text, etc and you can directly email all the people in the Group called a Sharepoint site.   You can maintain these pages, send notifications of changes, and easily keep the group updated with changing membership using eID/email address. 

To create a Group and site, follow these steps:

1. Go to O365 in your web browser by signing into Webmail at https://webmail.ksu.edu and click on the People icon (2 blue people heads) or the little 4 square More Apps icon at the bottom of the stack of icons down the left side of the window.  In that Search, type Groups
   1. 
2. You can then right-click or 2 finger click (mac) and Pin that Groups tool.
3. Click the New Group button in the upper left to start your new Group!
4. Give it an appropriate name and click Create and it will take a bit. 
5. You can add people at this point, maybe add a set of test people or helpers to start or you can say Not Now
   1. And you should keep the Privacy to Private so it is just the people you add, not all of KSU.
6. Once it is created, you will see Mail, Files, Events, Members right at the top and you can use those to set everything up.  The Site is the visual option that you are looking for.  It is a small blue button on the far upper right or in the middle of the page you should see a blue S that says "Add to the team site-Start sharing and collaborating on content in SharePoint." Click that and you can start setting up a site.
7. When you are ready, you can add your members (students) and keep the site, events, files and users updated.

Note:  The default notification option is Following in Inbox but users can control that via a button in the top right of the Group.