Why use SharePoint Hub Sites and not SharePoint Sub Sites!

hi it's Dougie wood and in this video I'm going to explain to you exactly why you should not be building SharePoint subsites or continuing to use a sharper internet which contains subsites underneath it so the first thing I'm going to talk about is what are SharePoint subsides so SharePoint subsides are a classic feature of SharePoint online meaning it's not part of the modern structure of SharePoint so SharePoint classic sites are being phased out of SharePoint online in favor of this new modern way of working with new modern sites Hub sites and all the kind of great features which goes along with it now SharePoint subsites as our classic feature and they are something which are sites created underneath a existing site now you'd typically see this where you might have say an intranet home page and then you would have Department sites which sit underneath them so you would have say the internet is your core kind of site and then a sub site for HR Finance marketing I.T and then individually have sites quite often when I'm looking at these kind of classic structures they would even have subjects underneath them so let's say it might be intranet uh forward slash um marketing and then forward slash a name of a project for example so these are the kind of structures you tend to see clearly identify a SharePoint subsite by the URL so take a look at this for example we've got here um the root URL of my SharePoint site you've then got sites and then forward slash now anything sites forward slash after that is going to be the core site so in this case it would be intranet then underneath this we've got a subsite which is human resources you can have more subjects underneath that so it might be for a particular project maybe the Citizens need that's a Project X and then you would see in the URL if you want to say documents it would say share documents the name of a folder than the name of any documents and that's typically how the URL is built out but within reason you have as many of these sub-site layers underneath a existing SharePoint site but that's something that we want to get away from in reality we should always just have in the modern world of SharePoint it would just be um the single site and we'll talk a little bit about how this is constructed later but you would see intranet and then it'll be shared documents or it'll be sites forward slash human resources and that would be your one site then we talk about using Hub sites later on to link these things together so another question would be when should I create subsites in SharePoint and the answer is never never create them going forward you should always be using the modern SharePoint functionality which is to create communication or modern team sites and then link them up or associate them to a hub site which we're going to come on to talking about but some of the reasons why people used to create subsites was it provided a lot of the features that now Hub sites would provide so it would provide a consistent navigation meaning that you could create the navigation at your top site and the subsites would inherit that navigation it would also inherit permissions and this was probably the most commonly used reason why you'd have sub sites because you can Define your permission structure at the very top and that will then sort of trickle down to all the other areas so taking example again from this URL bar if say for example we had in front of this uh intranet was our top site Human Resources was our second site uh subsites Project X was a subset underneath that and then we had the documents library then we had folders then we had our document name say dot docx the permissions would be set at the internet layer um say for example all users have read access to the site and then it would go down and all that permissions would be inherited to the sub layers but let's say for example we could then change the permissions at this layer to say okay well actually everyone's got read access but also the security group for the human resources team have edit access from this point onwards and then we might break it down further so under this project okay well actually only two people from Human Resources have added access to this particular project and everyone else has read access so each of these different layers you could Define different permission structures and then underneath that all the sub layers would then inherit that permission structure so it's all well and good talking about don't use SharePoint subsides but what can I use instead of SharePoint subsites so instead of using SharePoint subsites what we can use is the new modern feature from SharePoint online which is known as SharePoint Hub sites and this is the direct replacement of SharePoint subsites so any of the functionality that you're looking to get from using SharePoint subsites we should be using a SharePoint Hub site to replace so what is a SharePoint Hub site so Microsoft Define a SharePoint Hub site as a SharePoint Hub site helps you meet the needs of your organization by connecting and organizing sites based on Project Department division region and anything else that you can kind of think of as a category it makes it easy to discover related content such as news and other site activities such as documents being created and apply common navigation branding and site structure and permissions throughout all of the sites which are associated to the hub site now the beauty of a SharePoint Hub site is actually that you can have you can actually have multiple SharePoint Hub sites typically most organizations would have one Hub site as that internet homepage but you might have Hub sites for let's say for example if you're an international company um and you say for example got um a base in the US Europe and Asia you might have three separate Hub sites because there might be different content different news different people accessing them um even different languages and things like that so you might have different Hub sites for different things you can also choose to roll up and Associate Hub sites into each other now as well so you can actually have a master Hub site which US Europe and Asia feeds into so what does a SharePoint Hub site look like so this is a typical SharePoint Hub site now you can see across the top we've got this consistent navigation bar which will flow between all the different sites that I have access to so if I was to move to my finance site you'll see that the navigation bar remains exactly the same so the URL has changed it's not science forward slash The Hub forward slash Finance it's just sites forward slash Finance as it's its own independent site and the great thing that is its own independent site let's say for example going back to that scenario where we've got multiple Hub sites if this was something that we wanted to change its Association um to a hub site we can always go into site information and we can change which Hub site from this drop down bar actually it's Associated to so we could always switch it around one of the limitations of SharePoint subsites is that they were static once you created a subsite it was very much in a linear structure that cannot be moved out you cannot get out of that structure and Associate it to a totally different site with the help site Association feature you can do you can change around at any time we go back to HUB site by clicking on the link across the top um and you can see that the the colors I've used I've used this midnight green color and it's actually um set at the Hub site layer as a color theme and then all the other sites which are associated to that Hub site are then using that color so I've not set this color at the finance layer it's actually set at the hubsite layer so even if I went into uh into here and I was to click on to change the look and then theme you would see it actually tells me your site is connected to the hub site and it's set and this theme is set automatically um from the top layer so I can't even change it at the the this kind of secondary layer um of site so that's the navigation we've also got um the the theme as I say that the colors applied through those other sites as well we've also got the ability to set permissions so if I go into the Cog on my internet home page and then I click on site permissions you'll also see there's a hub area here so we can sync Hub permissions to Associated sites so this is the other feature I was talking about earlier about why people used to use SharePoint subsides is that you can have this permission structure which is set at the top layer and using Hub sites that are so uh that have sites Associated to it they can then sync those permissions up as well um we've also got the ability to roll up content so something that subsites didn't do that well and now it's much Slicker much easier is the ability to roll up news articles and documents and other things going on so here we've got this news article roll up where we can see news articles which are coming from say human resources finance and these news articles are directly created on those uh sites which are associated to the hub site and then I can pull out as a news feed any news articles which are associated to this Hub site so that pulls them up automatically you can do things very similar as well with documents and events and things like that as well so there's some of the core kind of things that you want to be looking out for as I say we've got the shared navigation we've got the color themes we've got the permissions and we've got the news uh Roll-Ups just to name a few core features of why you should be using SharePoint Hub sites instead of SharePoint subsites I hope you found this video useful if you did please like And subscribe to my channel for future uh top tips around SharePoint and Microsoft 365. if you've got any questions at all um or we've got any thoughts about using SharePoint Hub sites or the decommissioning of SharePoint subsites please use the comment feed below thank you very much

Channel: Dougie Wood

Views: 4,441

Keywords: Hub Site Content, Hub Site Design, Hub Site Permissions, Hub Site Rollup, Hub Site Templates, Hub Site creation, Sharepoint subsite, create a hub site in sharepoint online, creating a sharepoint hub site, hub site, hub site in sharepoint online, hub site navigation, hub site sharepoint online, hub sites, set up your sharepoint hub site, sharepoint, sharepoint hub, sharepoint hub site tutorial, sharepoint hub sites, sharepoint online hub sites, what is a sharepoint hub site

Id: 8iu5NQ5-Lus

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023