Scenario/Problem: You want to create an Internet site with Office 365.
Solution: To create an Internet site, navigate to the SharePoint Admin Center page and click the New button in the ribbon to open the drop-down menu .
In this menu, choose Public Site. The dialog that opens asks you for a
site title, an address (in which you can select from the list of
domains you have registered with your Office 365 account), a language,
a time zone, the site’s administrator and quota, but in this dialog you can only pick from the list of domains, and not specify any other URL addresses, as shown in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1 Creating a new public site collection.
After clicking OK, you are redirected back to
the SharePoint Admin Center, where you see an animation next to the
link to the site, signifying that the site is being provisioned. Wait
for the animation to stop, and click the link of the site collection to
open the dialog for the site collection properties. This dialog will
have two links to the actual site—one for you as a site owner (who will
need to edit the site) and another—the public website address for the
visitors to the site. Clicking either of these opens a new window. When
you have just created a site, it is not yet available to visitors from
the Internet, until you decide to do so by clicking on the Make Website
Online button in the new site, as shown in Figure 2.
FIGURE 2. A new public site, with the Make Website Online button at the top.
Note
To have your site
accessible to people over the Internet you must set up DNS for it. To
do that, click the DNS Information button in the ribbon, and follow the
instructions provided in that dialog.
When you click the Make Website Online
button, a dialog appears explaining that the website is currently only
available to users who are logged on, and a button to make the website online, as shown in Figure 3.
FIGURE 3 The Make Website Online dialog.
Clicking the button
opens another confirmation dialog, in which you confirm again that you
are ready to make the site online. After you approve that dialog, a
final dialog appears telling you the site is now available to anyone on
the Internet. Open it from another computer, or from another browser to
see it as visitors will see it—without the editing controls, as shown
in Figure 4.
FIGURE 4. The new Internet site is shown to visitors without the editing controls.
