SharePoint online enables you to create either a Team Site or a Communication Site.

A Team Site enables a group of users to work together and collaborate on content by creating and editing documents or creating and managing lists. On a team site home page you can view links to important team files, apps and web pages along with viewing recent site activity.

A Communication Site is where you can share information with colleagues, such as news, reports, statuses and other relevant information in a graphically based format. They can be used for internal campaigns, reports and product launches that address broad audiences across an organisation.

Once a top-level site has been created you can create subsites. Subsites enable you to use a wide range of templates, such as classic team, blog or document centre sites. In SharePoint Online, you can create subsites using the ‘classic’ template only.

1.     Click the Settings button.

2.     Click Site Contents.

3.     Click the New drop-down list and select Subsite.

4.     Enter a Title, Description and short URL.

5.     Select the required Site from the available templates.

6.     Specify whether you wish to inherit the permissions or use unique permissions.

7.     Specify the required options within the Navigation section.

8.     Click Create.

Alerts are notifications of changes to content on a site that you receive as email messages or text messages depending upon how the site is configured. With the required permission level within a site you can view and cancel alerts for other people by using the User Alerts page.

1.     Click the Settings button.

2.     Click Site Information.

3.     Click View all Site Settings.

4.     Within Site Administration, click User alerts.

5.     From the provided drop-down list select the user name you wish to view the alerts for.

6.     Select the required alert and Delete Selected Alerts, if required.

The access request feature allows users to request access to content that they do not have permission to see. As a site owner you can configure the feature to send you an email when someone requests access to a site, you can then choose whether you wish to approve or decline their request.

If you approve their request you can also specify the permission level you wish to assign to them.

The access request feature also works together with the Share command for sites.  If someone who is not a site owner for a site uses the Share command to invite other people to view a site, then that action will generate an access request for the site owner.

Site users have the opportunity to invite other people to collaborate on sites whilst the site owners have the authority over who has access to these sites and what level of permission users are assigned.

1.     Click the Settings button.

2.     Click Site Permissions.

3.     Click Advanced permissions settings.

4.     On the Permissions tab, click Access Request Settings.

5.     Specify the required settings in the Access Requests Settings box and click OK.

After a site has been created you may want to provide or restrict user access to the site or its contents.

For example, you might want to provide access only to members of your team, or you might want to provide access to everyone, but restrict editing for some.

The simplest way to work with permissions is to use the default groups and permissions levels provided, which cover most common scenarios.

Every site exists in a site collection, which is a group of sites under a single top-level site. The top-level site is called the root site of the site collection.

All the sites and site content in a collection inherit the permissions settings of the root or top-level site. When you assign unique permissions to sites, libraries and items those items no longer inherit permissions from their parent site.

Lists and libraries inherit permissions from the site to which they belong. If you are a site owner, you can stop permissions inheritance and change the permission settings for the list or library.

Depending upon site settings, a user can interrupt the default permission inheritance for a list or library item by sharing a document or item with someone who does not have access. In that case, SharePoint automatically stops inheritance on the document.