SharePoint Online Blogs

Today one of the clients I am working for asked me to suggest options for blogging on Office 365 SharePoint Online.

Following are my 2 cents on it.

We have 2 options out of the box
1. SharePoint Blog site
2. Your personal Blog

Let me share what are our options with each type of blog posting and how to do it.

SharePoint Blog Site

You need to have administrative rights on the site/site collection to be able to create a new (Blog) sub site.

On the gear icon click on Site contents

Under Subsites select new subsite

On the New SharePoint Site provide all the required information and select Blog from Select a template Collaboration tab

Click Create.
Once you have the blog site ready you will see following on your Blog home page.

I must admit this is not a very best of interface but this feature is out of box and it works.
On the right hand side you see following options

Create a post

This link lets you create a new blog post.

Manage Post, Manage comments, Manage categories

SharePoint keeps blogs, comments and categories in different sharepoint lists and each link lets you work on the respective sharepoint list.

Change post layout:

Layout that you see on your home page is different from mine because I have chosen Boxed layout. Other options are Basic and Inline.

Your personal Blog

Click on the About Me link on your profile picture on the top right corner of the page. Under Profile you will see Blog section which lets you create your personal blogs. The interface is awesome and also lets you write posts directly from your Office Word which you can post directly to your Blog but I dont like a few things about it.

I cannot share it as I would like it to.

You need to post it to your Yammer feed to get a visibility

Share sends an email with a link to the post.

Clicking on All posts takes me to all my published and draft posts and lets me create a new post which is similar to the small + New post link on the top right on the Blog section on my profile page.

Open your Office Word and compose a pretty blog with images and videos and you can directly publish it to your Blog.

It really depends what type of Blog you or your organization needs. If its really your personal blog which you want to share with your team, My blogs is a way to go but if its organization wide which you want people to be interacting with go for SharePoint Blog Site.