SharePoint catalog groups sites around the way you manage
Reviewed by Helen Jones
A fresh practitioner guide explains SharePoint Catalog Management, which groups tenant sites by categories such as department, region or cost centre. Admins can use built-in categories or create their own from a CSV, custom site property or Microsoft Entra ID extension attribute.
A flat list of sites makes governance reports hard to act on. Grouping sites around the way the organisation operates gives a small IT team a quicker route to answer questions such as which department owns a set of sites or where a sharing problem is concentrated. The category design matters more than the screen. A useful first structure matches decisions people already make—owner, business unit, sensitivity or lifecycle—rather than creating a clever taxonomy nobody maintains. Custom categories also have refresh timing and scale limits, so they need an operating owner.
Analysis
Choose one recurring governance question that takes too long to answer, then test a single catalog category against it. Start with a small, maintainable source of truth and verify that the expected sites appear before relying on it for reporting or AI prompts.
Source note
Pulse published by Collab365 Spaces, reviewed by Helen Jones on . Cite as "Group SharePoint sites before asking an admin agent to explain them", Collab365 Spaces.