Dude. Where did all the Apps in my SharePoint Personal Site Go?

What

Microsoft has done a really nice job of slimming down and simplifying what a SharePoint Personal Site looks and behaves like for end users (you know, those “My Sites” that historically/rarely got adopted). By the way, this applies to both SharePoint 2013 on premise and Office 365 (SharePoint Online).

In the new world (SharePoint 2013), Less is More. I’m all in, looks great.

However, in my personal case and for those wanting a little more (I am, and others will be of course, a Site Collection administrator for my personal site … so I want all the toys I can possibly play with), you might find yourself wondering where the rest of the Apps are, that you would find say, in a typical team site?

 

So What

So you’ve clicked on the SkyDrive OneDrive link at the top of your screen and you landed in your personal site (in my case, in my web application, at /personal/swallbridge.

Next you wanted to add an app (For example, in my case, I still like having my own little Wiki to work with though of course, I’m leaning on OneNote more and more all the time … check it out, www.onenote.com – it’s the foshizzle and every month become even more foshizzle’y)

 

And (Gasp). Dude, where’s all my apps? Below you can see that I’ve approved a few apps from the app store, that come from the App Catalog, but where are my Wiki Libraries, Contact Lists, Custom Lists, Picture Libraries, Calendars, Discussion Boards, Issues, Tasks, etc.?

Well, never fear. As part of the cleaner setup and to keep curious folks from turning on features they don’t understand or don’t want to understand, the “Team Collaboration Lists” feature is not activated in the Personal Site Collection. Makes sense, but might be a bit jarring at first…

This is what I want to see…

Ahhh. That’s better (there’s more by the way, I just didn’t want to screen capture them all 😉

Now What

So, if you want to enable other list and library templates (or rather, Apps, *sigh*), you just need to turn on the Site Feature “Team Collaboration Lists”.

Go to Site Settings, Site Features and Activate “Team Collaboration Lists”.