Microsoft 365 Apps and Services for Work and School Accounts
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A SharePoint list is a table that lives on a SharePoint site: rows are items, and columns describe them. Creating one takes a minute. Getting its columns right takes a little more thought, because the name you give a column on day one is the name that apps and flows use for good.
When an app keeps its data in SharePoint, everyone who uses the app needs permission on the SharePoint site too. SharePoint's obvious Share site button can't give the permission an app's users usually need, and its other sharing dialog quietly adds people to the site's Members group. This guide gives a security group exactly Contribute, and nothing more.
A SharePoint site is where lists, libraries and pages live. When a site only needs to hold data or publish information, you don't want a Microsoft 365 group, a shared mailbox or a team created along with it. A communication site is that plain site, with nothing else attached.
Plenty of teams still track career development in spreadsheets: which skills each role needs, how far each person has got, and who has signed it off. This series replaces that with a Power Apps app. Each person sees the competencies their role expects and writes a short response for each one. Their manager then approves or declines it, all on SharePoint and the Microsoft 365 licenses you already have.
Giving a team access to something one person at a time works until someone joins or leaves. Then you're editing access in five places. A security group fixes that: you give access to the group once, and from then on you only change who is in it.
Microsoft 365 only knows who reports to whom if somebody tells it. That "somebody" is the Manager field on each person's account, next to their Job title. Fill them in, and Outlook, Teams and the apps you build all know who someone's manager and direct reports are, and what their role is.
Before anyone can sign in to Microsoft 365, they need their own user account. An account on its own isn't enough, though: until it has a license, the person can't use Outlook, Teams, SharePoint or Power Apps. The Microsoft 365 admin center creates the account and assigns the license in one short wizard. You'll use it here.
Team addresses such as support@ or sales@ are often distribution lists, and a customer should get the answer from that address — not from whichever teammate happened to pick the message up. Outlook on the web can send from the list, but the From line you need is hidden until you ask for it.
A team address like support@ is usually a distribution list — and creating the list is only half the job. Until someone has Send As permission on it, the team can receive mail at that address but cannot reply from it, and that permission lives in a different admin center from the one where you create the list.
