Hub sites in SharePoint exist to allow organizations to connect multiple sites and organize them into categories based on various criteria. That could be division, department, project, region, or many other factors.
SharePoint Hub Sites:
– Improve the discover-ability of content
– Allow companies to apply consistent branding and structure, as well as navigation, across several sites
– Offer the ability to search across multiple, related sites
SharePoint administrators have the ability to dictate how many hub sites can exist, and to control who has the option of associating their sites with a given hub. If a site creator associates a site with a hub then the site will acquire a ‘hub site’ nav bar at the very top. It will also inherit the look of that site, and any applications or custom lists which are associated with it.
Who Can Manage Hub Sites?
Only SharePoint administrators can create hub sites. A Site collection administrator has the option of associating a SharePoint hub site with an existing hub site, but they cannot create a new hub. If an administrator clicks the ‘create site’ link that is located in the upper-right corner of an existing hub site, then that new site will automatically be associated with the hub.
Shared Navigation and Search
The main reasons that you should use SharePoint hub sites are the shared navigation option, and the cross-hub search. These two features ensure that people can find the content that they need. Hubs also help to create a cohesive brand across all sites and save time when it comes to searching too. Users will see the content that is presented on the hub sites, without having to worry about going to each site individually. SharePoint will handle security and access rights automatically, so individual users will be shown only content that they are allowed to access.
Easy for Administrators
SharePoint hub sites are easy for administrators to develop. When an administrator creates a hub site, what they are really doing is converting their existing site into a hub. The hub site navigation bar will be placed at the top of the site, but the home page and the content of the site will be preserved. If that’s all you do when you make a hub site, then you will still enjoy some benefits because of the network search and the ease of access to other sites in the network through the nav bar, but you are missing out on some useful features.
SharePoint offers Web Parts that are handy widgets which you can add to your site to add more features. One of the most useful web parts is the News web part. This will aggregate the news from the sites that are a part of the hub and show it on the home page. You can select which sites will be included in the web part, so that the news remains as relevant as possible and so that very active sites don’t drown out the other sites on the hub. Again, SharePoint will not show a user News if it is from a property that they don’t have the rights to view.
Other useful Web Parts include Events and Highlighted Content. These are good ways of showing off the most important content that is being created on the sites in the network.
Planning a Hub
If you’re new to online collaboration and communities, then deciding how to organize your network of content may be tricky. Hub sites are very useful, but you need to have an overarching idea of what you want on the intranet. Think of the hub sites as the connective tissue that will hold the separate team sites together. Ideally, anything that is going to be the focus of a lot of effort and communication deserves its own hub site. So, if you are a software development company and you have three separate projects, each project would have its own site collection. A hub site brings together several other sites.
You might want to have separate sites for your art team, UX team, backend team, etc.
Prior to hub sites, subsites were used to provide the ‘connections’ for the rest of the intranet. Subsites are inflexible, though, and relying on them makes it hard to make changes in the future. Should you need to restructure, you will have to change a lot of links and a lot of content. Subsites are harder to control in terms of security policies too. A hub site can be updated, changed, managed and reclassified much more easily, and is therefore comparatively future-proof.
If you think about how often staff members change teams, projects get started or abandoned, and working relationships change, it makes sense to use hub sites instead because they cover all of those awkward management challenges for you, providing a smoother experience for your team members.