With the new Office 365 running SharePoint Online 2013, Microsoft has made some changes:
- The first one, but not the more important, the default public URL has changed to http://<yourtenant>-public.sharepoint.com while with SharePoint Online 2010 it was http://<yourtenant>-web.sharepoint.com
- The second one is at the Site Settings level. You can only manage interface (look), search engine optimization and access rights; The ability to activate/disable SharePoint features has gone. This may be a mess…
- The default public site is coming with a blog available to allow you to publish a corporate blog but this IS NOT a subsite using the blog template; it is LIST. This means there is NO WAY to allow your visitors to leave a comment on your post.
- The last one is you can not create subsite below the public root site collection. The link available from the list content ((+) new subsite) is not available, neither the direct URL (/_layouts/15/newsbweb.aspx) is working. If you tried to amend the URL with the /_layouts/15/newsbweb.aspx, you will get a blank page (this is NOT an error page). This limitation may be also a mess.
We can except some changes from Microsoft regarding these limitations with public site; indeed, they did a relative good job to improve the SharePoint Online public site (especially regarding the look) but it’s now coming with more functional limitations.