Wow! The interest in modernizing SharePoint Site Architecture has been strong. Thanks to everyone for your comments and feedback on my previous blog post. If you haven’t yet read through the Part 1 of Modernizing your Approach to Site Architecture in SharePoint, please see that here. Let’s keep the dialog going! As we continue with our story around modernizing our site architecture, we need to address the addition of some new functionality in SharePoint Online called a Hub Site.
Note: Hub sites are now in “Launched” status according to the Office 365 Roadmap. This means they should be available to 100% of the tenants worldwide! It’s important to note that Hub Sites are a SharePoint Online “only” feature – they didn’t make the cutoff for SharePoint 2019 on-premises release.
The basic idea behind a hub, is that you can share things like navigation, logos, and themes between sites that are similar or related, and then roll up the news and activity from those sites to one place. Consider the scenario that you are rolling out department intranet sites, but want a single landing page where the entire organization can see a rollup of the announcements from each department all at once. (This might be the most common request we get!) Hubs give us the ability to do that without custom code or custom search web parts. If we look at this from an architecture perspective, it also gives us a way to associate or group the sites in our flat architecture, without using sub-sites.
As a refresher, here is the image that Microsoft provides to help us understand this concept:
Let’s go back to the example diagram in my Part 1 blog and add to it. First, we’re going to just create two additional modern sites, and then “hubify” each of them.
Review our new architecture below, it is still flat:
Once we associate sites to that hub, the actual architecture is still flat, but you can think of your sites as being grouped like this.
A few important notes:
You can find instructions to hubify here. You can find the steps to add a site collection to a hub here.
You’ll notice that I left the HR (Collab) site out of the Departments hub. This is because that content is highly sensitive. This HR Collab site best functions in a silo because the members of that site are not sharing their content with others, and don’t have a need to roll up any information from this site.
At first glance, you may be wondering why we would bother with all of this. So far, the functionality shared can easily be accomplished with a SharePoint sub-site. However, there are some additional benefits we haven’t yet discussed:
Maybe. But probably not…
If you are migrating your legacy on-premises site into SharePoint Online, It is still a great time to break down your sites and consider creating more site collections, you just don’t necessarily have to convert EVERY sub-site. As with any scenario in SharePoint, you should consider the effort involved and make sure that it makes sense for your organization.
The best part about hub sites, is that if you don’t like the way you’ve organized, you can move your sites around to other hubs! Stay tuned for Microsoft Ignite videos for the latest updates on Hub Sites.
References:
Basic overview from Microsoft: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/SharePoint-hub-sites-new-in-Office-365/ba-p/109547
Site Designs/Site Scripts with Hubs: https://redmondmag.com/articles/2018/08/21/sharepoint-online-hub-site-expansion.aspx
Webinar- Modern Architecture for Modern SharePoint: https://youtu.be/btvboOIWYBA