When you have the amazing opportunity to be a SCA at some business in the cloud, or on premise, in SharePoint, you may not want to use the gear icon and you may notice that sometimes some of the locations you’re looking for seem to move around. Don’t let that drive you crazy. Plus, if you’re working with SharePoint, there is a good chance that you are already nuts!
Also, the term SCA is going the way of the velociraptor and is currently synonymous with Site Admin (SA). Not to be confused with Site Owner. Click here to read more.
Site Admins can do more than owners. Maybe, we will get the guys down in the Another SharePoint Blog mail room to put down their coffee mugs and write an article about those differences in another post; but, for now, just know that an Admin can do more than an owner.
This behavior, of the menu changing (not the permissions deal) is due to how modern pages render the menu, if the page was once classic, if the site collection has classic features activated, and other reasons.
Here are some shortcuts you can use to make other members of the IT staff and members of management worship you like the SharePoint god that you know you are!!!
Instructions: append these strings to the / behind the site collection URL, for example if your site collection was named awesomesite, you would append /_layouts/15/settings.aspx to the site url to go to the settings page. Freaking ingenious on Microsoft’s part to actually use a page name that makes sense.
Pro Tip: Microsoft SharePoint URLs are formatted like this: https:// Tenant Name / Managed Path / Site Collection Name, e.g. https://supercool.sharepoint.com/sites/AwesomeSite where awesome site is the site collection name and supercool is the name of the business.
Shortcuts:
Global Navigation (aka top links bar aka menu on the top)
_layouts/15/topnav.aspx
Current Navigation (aka quick launch aka menu on the left hand side of the screen)
_layouts/15/quiklnch.aspx
Site Settings
_layouts/15/settings.aspx
Advanced Permissions
_layouts/15/user.aspx
Permission Levels in the site collection
_layouts/15/role.aspx
Site Contents
_layouts/15/viewlsts.aspx
Site Collection Administrator management
_layouts/15/mngsiteadmin.aspx
Site Collection and Site Features
_layouts/15/ManageFeatures.aspx?Scope=Site and then for the site features _layouts/15/ManageFeatures.aspx
People and Groups
_layouts/15/groups.aspx
Audit Logs
_layouts/15/reporting.aspx (note: if you dont see your hearts content of auditing here, turn on the reporting feature in the site collection features)
Sites and Workspaces
_layouts/15/mngsubwebs.aspx (if you go here and try to create a subsite, do not be surprised if you receive a SharePoint error that advises you to create a new site collection aka site instead. This is on purpose to avoid the 2000 list and library limitation and to make it easier on the search infrastructure)
Storage Metrics
_layouts/15/Storman.aspx
Workflows
_layouts/15/wrksetng.aspx (dont use this sh*t, instead use power automate flows)
Settings links to every library and list, vs going to site contents and the …
_layouts/15/mcontent.aspx
Please reach out to us if you are looking for a menu option on the settings page of your site collection and do not see the option for your site. We can help you find it if it still exists.
Happy SharePointing and have a great rest of the day night or whatever!
