Home Site vs SharePoint Hub Sites | Set a site as your home site

hi it's Dougie wood and in this video I'm going to be talking to you about SharePoint home sites and what the difference between them are and SharePoint Hub sites so starting off what is a SharePoint home site Microsoft Define a SharePoint home site as the ability to provide a customized Landing experience a reflector organization's brand voice and priorities a home site also serves as the gateway to other portals and other SharePoint sites throughout your organization's Intranet but not only is this providing a gateway to other high traffic portals and connecting people with internet-wide search experiences it's also leveraging the features of Microsoft Viva connections and in fact if you're deploying Viva connections um then setting a home site is actually one of the steps that you'll need to take at a high level glance though the functionality that you're going to get is the search bar across the top won't actually just search a single SharePoint site or if you've already enabled this as a hub site I'm going to go on to talking about Hub sites in a moment it's not just going to search the sites Associated to that Hub anymore it's going to search all of SharePoint just going to find all the different SharePoint sites and files and different things throughout SharePoint as a whole um as I scroll down you'll also see that it sets news that come from uh this home site as official news so the official news will be labeled and you know this little big bold label next to it with the name of your internet now my internet is called the Hub um so that's what the label Next News will be but essentially what SharePoint will do is it'll prioritize these news articles as being the number one official news which is coming from my organization so on the SharePoint landing pages um it will actually prioritize these news articles above any other news articles that come through you'll also see on the left hand side um that we now have this sort of bar which has a global navigation option and it's Global navigation is actually really easy to set up and I'll be showing you this later on but essentially This Global navigation will then follow me throughout SharePoint anywhere I go um which is more than what the Hub navigation will do which will only um following through sites which is inherited this Hub navigation bar so at a very high level that is what a SharePoint home site is so what is the difference between a home site and a SharePoint Hub site um within SharePoint now I'm not going to go too in detail about SharePoint Hub sites I've got a couple of different videos already on my YouTube channel which talk about what our Hub sites Now to create a hub site however just a high level to compare them against a home site a SharePoint Hub site has a few key features it has this Hub navigation bar across the top which is essentially a mega menu as it has three layers deep so you can have user number one you can use number two and BBC as number three and that Hub navigation bar will be inherited by any other SharePoint site which is associated to this Hub site now in theory most organizations which are smaller medium-sized organizations would have just one Hub site and that would be your equivalent of this home site feature anyway and you can enable a home site to be a hub site to leverage both of these sets of functionality whereas an Enterprise level company might have multiple Hub sites but they might only have one home site which share this Global navigation as a global navigation will appear everywhere in every single SharePoint site regardless of what Hub site is associated to whereas this Hub navigation bar will only appear on the sites which are inheriting this Hub site all the Hub site features include branding so you can set branding like this green and then if I move to one of my other sites like my finance site which is actually inheriting uh this like this site you can see it's got exactly the same brand colors which are pulling through it also has um across the top the same navigation bar this hob navigation bar other kind of Hub features as well is we can roll up news articles so um news articles which are associated to this Hub such as Finance it's rolling up the news articles directly from that site as well so those are some of the key benefits of having a hub site but typically as a larger Enterprise company you might have multiple Hub sites maybe they are sort of based on around the world so you might have an international company might have a US Hub site a Europe Hub site um and and sort of Asia specific kind of Hub sites so there's a couple of different reasons why you might have different Hub sites there but as I say you typically have one SharePoint home site which can also be use those same Hub sites functionality so before we go any further talking about how to then set up a home site enable those features I just want to have a quick reminder to subscribe to my channel it really does help all YouTube content creators if you do subscribe to their Channel as well as like videos and comment any thoughts or questions that you might have so what is the default home site for SharePoint so by default there is no SharePoint home site you have to enable it and I'm going to come on to showing you this in a second so if you didn't have a home site set what you'd see on the SharePoint navigation bar is actually there'll just be a button which says SharePoint start page now this isn't a server internet home page it's more of a searching page so if you do not have a home site set that's what you'll see is this home icon will appear and it'll take you to this page where you'll be able to see sites which you're following recent sites you've accessed as well as frequent sites you're accessing and also over time news articles and things like that would appear on this page to be able to promote those as well but we're interested in how we set a home site how when we click on this button instead of taking to the start page we want to take it to our intranet home page in this case mine's called the Hub so how do we set a site as your home site within SharePoint now actually to achieve this you need to be a SharePoint admin now I don't mean just an admin of a single SharePoint site I mean within admin Center of Microsoft 365 you need to have the SharePoint admin role so if you don't have that then you'll need to either contact your it support desk or it provider to either ask them to follow these steps or to give you the SharePoint admin role so starting from the beginning then I'm gone to office.com which is a home page of Microsoft 365. I then need to click on this admin tile now as I say if you do not have the sharper admin role you will not see this admin button appear then I'm in the Microsoft 365 admin Center and I click on show all to see all the different admin centers I can access again I need to go to SharePoint admin Center and if you don't have the role you won't see it now I'm in the SharePoint admin Center I need to find the settings Cog and then what I'll see here is across the top it has home site so set the main Landing site of your internet now when you click on that it's going to ask you for a URL and to enter into this box now I've just copied the URL of my uh The Hub site and I'm now pasting that into this URL of the share of the site you want to use box here so now I've put that in I just need to click on Save and what that's going to do is it's now going to activate that particular SharePoint site to be the home site for my intranet so if I go back to the site now it may just take a couple of minutes and a couple of refreshes so I'm just going to refresh uh the page and then boom there we can see it's now changed as the icons change now it wouldn't necessarily change this icon straight away it's only because I've already set this site to be a home site previously that this icon has changed now you will continue to see almost like the little uh home icon here for the time being if you haven't enabled the um overarching Global navigation so to enable that we need to go into the settings to enable and customize the global navigation so the global navigation as I was saying before is actually something which will appear throughout SharePoint so it's not Hub site specific it's SharePoint specific so setting this up with your own icon and your own links can be really useful as it's going to appear throughout SharePoint so let's take a look at that so to enable this and also customize it we can click on the Cog across the top and then we can click on this Global navigation now you can only do this from your home site so don't try and do this on um another site so click on global navigation and then you can see um by default it would just say uh it's disabled so you'd need to click on enabled and then you can click on change logo so I've just used the Microsoft 365 logo for now because I quite like the look of this but you can use your own little icon whichever one you like um and then you need to select the um the home site navigation or the Hub or Global navigation now basically the home site navigation will just give you this navigation bar to start with and you can edit it or the Hub navigation bar will give you the Hub navigation of the home navigation site that you're using as your home site for now I'm just going to select home site navigation click on Save and then that will then enable my Global navigation now to edit it we need to go into the back end to the Cog and then click on global navigation and then you've got this edit Global navigation button here so by clicking that the navigation bar on the left hand side will appear and now this is exactly like a hub navigation bar or a slight navigation bar to edit we can add new links by click on the plus button here and we can either select as a link or a label uh we can specify the URL of what it's going to and the display name and even audience targets it then once we click on OK they'll add in our links so I've just added in for example a link to the hub home page a link to the news rollups as well as some links to some common apps that my organization is going to use like a PowerApp for the leave request or a PowerApp for the expense request just an example so now when people use this navigation they can easily jump to back to the home hub page from anywhere in SharePoint it doesn't even have to be a SharePoint site which is associated to this Hub site or they can go directly to the news area of my SharePoint site or they can go directly into one of the apps to launch those so that's a really beneficial reason to setting your home site I hope you found that video useful um if you do please subscribe to the channel uh like this video and put any thoughts comments uh questions in the um comments box below um I know it's a little bit confusing in terms of the the terminologies here um in terms of having a home site and a hub site it used to be that Hub sites were pretty much the the core kind of top layer and they were your home pages for the internet uh and now we have this new feature which is setting your home sites and there's pros and cons to sort of using sort of both um but I would suggest that you have your home site set um with that navigation bar and you also enable it as a hub site so you can still use all those same features that we've talked about in previous videos such as the Hub navigation as well as the share The Branding permissions and content roll up as well thank you for watching and stay tuned for future videos

Channel: Dougie Wood

Views: 2,660

Keywords: sharepoint, hub sites, sharepoint hub sites, sharepoint online, sharepoint hub, hub site sharepoint online, hub site, microsoft sharepoint, create a hub site in sharepoint online, what is a sharepoint hub site, sharepoint online hub sites, sharepoint hub site tutorial, set up your sharepoint hub site, hub site in sharepoint online, sharepoint tutorial, sharepoint online hub site, SharePoint Home Site, sharepoint global navigation, sharepoint global navigation not showing

Id: -OmDZ-IiGYE

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 02 2023