Take the Hassle Out of Office Template Deployments with SharePoint
Need to deploy your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint templates to both endpoints and Office Online without any client-side configurations? In this post, we’ll guide you through creating a SharePoint Asset Library to centrally manage and deploy your Office templates effortlessly across Microsoft 365. Whether you’re looking to streamline your workflow or ensure consistency across your organisation, we’ve got you covered.
What you’ll need
To get started, you’ll need the following:
- At least SharePoint Administrator permissions.
- PowerShell terminal.
- Office templates (Duh!).
What’s an Asset Library?
An Asset Library in SharePoint is a specific type of document library that you can use to store and manage digital assets like images, logos, templates, and other key resources that your organisation frequently uses. It acts as a central location where you can keep all these assets organised and easily accessible for everyone who needs them. By setting up an Asset Library as an organisation asset, you make these resources available directly within Microsoft 365 apps, including Office Online, which means that users can quickly find and insert the correct assets into their documents and presentations without having to search manually or worry about consistency. It’s a straightforward way to ensure that everyone has access to the right resources whenever they need them.
Office templates
First and obvious, you need your templates, I would recommend within your organisation to get friendly with your marketing team and ensure that the templates you’re about to deploy are the final versions, once you have received your files, you need to ensure that they’re in a specific format so these can be deployed via an asset library, the files need to be in the following formats:
- Excel = .xltx
- PowerPoint = .potx
- Word = .dotx
Like so:
TIP: When creating your templates, leverage document properties wherever possible to minimise repetitive data entry, such as company name, like this:
We need to create a SharePoint site to host our Asset Library. While you can use an existing site, it’s generally better to set up a dedicated one. This approach allows you to govern permissions more effectively. If you use a SharePoint site that’s already serving other purposes, permissions might change frequently or become too broad, which could lead to unintended access. For example, you might want only a select group of people in your organisation to have permission to upload or edit templates, and this can be harder to control on a site that’s already in use. For a cleaner, more manageable setup, it’s recommended to create a new SharePoint site specifically for your Asset Libraries.
Make sure you’re a SharePoint Administrator from this point, go to your SharePoint admin page and create a new site, I would recommend a communication site however there are no limitations on other templates that you can use for this:
Again, it is a personal choice, but I tend to go with a blank template:
Give it a meaningful name, description and who will be the initial owner (can be changed later), I personally go for this:
- Site name: Organisation Assets
- Description: This site houses all of the document templates and co-dependent files for document templates are pushed to client endpoints and web clients, please ensure that you have authorisation to add templates to this location, also ensure that the files are in the correct format, e.g. word = dotx, excel = xltx and powerpoint = potx.
- Owner: Myself
OPTIONAL: I would recommend adding some text onto the homepage of this site to inform visitors of its purpose and how owners can upload content to the library like so:
Create a new document library
Within the SharePoint site, create a new document library, you can do this by navigating to the site, site contents, then +New, document library:
Blank library will be fine, I’ve called mine Company Office Templates, with a description of This document library houses all of <Company Name> document templates:
Within the library, upload your templates (remember to make sure they’re in the correct format!), I would recommend a flat structure rather than folders as it ends up syncing all folders even if there’s nothing in there applicable for the program, e.g. you have a folder called presentations and include your potx files, it’ll still sync the folder to word but within the folder it’ll be empty to word users, your library should contain your templates:
Set permissions
We need to control who can upload \ edit and view our document templates, I would recommend controlling who can upload \ edit via an Entra ID group, head over to Entra, create a group like so (rename to suit your needs):
Name: SPO – Organisation Assets – Owners
Description: This group grants owner permissions to the organisation assets site, which is used to deploy company office templates to endpoints.
Now within your site, go to the cog, site permissions:
Click share site, add the above group and select full control, it is optional if you want to send an email:
Share again, but this time type in Everyone except external users and select the permission of read:
You should end up with something like this:
Configure the asset library
Now that we have a site, a document library and permissions set, we need to use PowerShell to configure the asset library, first of all, gather the document library URL. simply navigate to the library and copy from the address bar, then within PowerShell run the following commands:
# Install the SharePoint PowerShell Module
Install-Module -Name Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell
# Connect to SPO Admin Site (Change this for your tenant)
Connect-SPOService -Url https://<yourdomain>-admin.sharepoint.com
# Create Asset library (Change the URL to your document libary created earlier, you may also be prompted to configure an CDN, click yes
Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary -LibraryURL https://<yourdomain>.sharepoint.com/sites/<sitename>/<libraryname> -OrgAssetType OfficeTemplateLibrary
# Verify the asset library
Get-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary
# OPTIONAL - Delete the asset libary
Remove-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary -LibraryUrl https://<yourdomain>.sharepoint.com/sites/<sitename>/<libraryname>The Results
After approx 24 hours (it can be less, I’ve sometimes found it to be longer too!), with a licenced user and signed into Office as a corp user, go to new, you should see a tab showing your tenant name and your configured templates (sorry I had to blur these out but you get the idea):
Further reading: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/organization-assets-library
Happy templating! 😊
