SharePoint Hub Sites - organizing for the future
A SharePoint Hub site is a new type of site that creates site relationships across your organization. It is expected that these types of sites will become the norm in SharePoint due to the flat navigation structure, creating an increasing sea of site collections in SharePoint Online as well for Microsoft 365 applications.
So, why is this new hub site needed for my projects?
Typically, when you create sites for projects in SharePoint, you create a site collection and then create sites and subsites within the site collection. This hierarchical approach allows for permissions inheritance, integrated search, and consistent URLs across the sites. While this approach is still valid, there are new factors to consider.
With Microsoft 365, applications like Teams, Planner, Yammer, and Project, automatically create SharePoint site collections, when projects are created. Essentially, this could result in having disparate site collections all over your organization without any relationship. The need to relate site collections and data together is why SharePoint Hub sites are essential.
So, what does a hub site provide?
- Search across all associated sites and subsites
- Shared navigation across all associated sites
- “Look and feel” inheritance to associated sites
- Information aggregation from associated sites and subsites
How do I set up a hub site?
You can select any site collection to be a hub site. This is done from the Microsoft 365 SharePoint admin menu. There are two options available:
- Register it as a hub site. By registering the site collection as a hub, you can associate other sites to it. For construction, the hub site could be a program, department, or organization with the associated sites being projects.
- Associate with a hub. Sites can only be associated with a single hub site. Associated sites automatically inherit the benefits of the hub as indicated above. Note: You can also associate a site to an existing hub within each modern site collection, if permitted, without having to do this from the SharePoint admin center.
If you are looking to take advantages of the new Microsoft 365 applications (Teams, Project, etc.), Office365 groups, inherited permissions, and site mailboxes, you really need to rethink how you structure your sites going forward. Lydon Solutions managed services is here to help. To schedule a free consultation, visit LydonSolutions.com.