What is a hub site and what are its benefits?
Microsoft has introduced a new term called Hub Site in SharePoint recently. Hub Site helps you organize your intranet hierarchy properly. You can easily manage the hierarchical structure of various departments, teams, communication sites; and change the linking any time you want in just a single click.
In old versions of SharePoint, we used to create site collections and subsites till n level to create organization hierarchy. A major disadvantage of this was you can’t change the hierarchy.
In every organization, vertical and horizontal restructuring happens many times depending upon the needs. This change should get reflected immediately in your portals as well. Hub site helps very efficiently in this restructuring.
Hub sites provide additional features like,
- Shared navigation and branding – while you are working on your own team or department site; you will be shown common global navigation below the suite bar from the hub site.
- Roll-up of content and search – as Hub site is the parent of a group of related sites, it will help in searching related content like news, recent activities from across all those sites.
Note
Association with a hub does not change the permissions on a site. If you associate a site that has restricted access with a hub, only users who have access to the restricted site will see content rolled up on the hub. Information surfaced on the hub site is security trimmed: if you don't have access to the content, you won't see it.
How to make a site as Hub Site?
Plan well before you start. Decide which site you want to make a hub site or create a new one. You can transform an existing site to a hub site or create a new communication site and make it a hub site.
Login to the SharePoint Admin Center site. The URL of the SharePoint admin center should be like this -
https://yourtenantname-admin.sharepoint.com/
You might see a classic admin center. Click on the “Open it now” button to see new admin center.
Click on Active sites from the left side navigation. Select the site which you want to transform into Hub Site or create a new communication site and select it. From Hub command bar menu, click on "Register as hub site".
Enter the hub name and click on "Save".
How to associate a site to a Hub site?
We have seen how to convert or create a new hub site. Let’s see how we can link or associate our existing communication or team site to the hub site.
Log into the SharePoint admin center site, navigate to the new admin center as explained above, and select the site which you want to link to the hub.
From Hub command menu, select "Associate with a Hub".
Choose the hub site to which you want to associate the selected site and click on "Save".
This will inherit the global navigation of the Hub site to the demo site. The demo site news and activities will get rolled up to the Developer Center hub site.
How to remove the association from Hub Site?
As mentioned above, organization restructuring can happen any time and you might need to remove associations from one hub and link the site to another hub. Let’s see how to remove the association of site from Hub site.
Log in to SharePoint Admin Center site, navigate to the new admin center as explained above, select the site which you want to unlink from hub site, and from Hub command menu, select "Change hub association".
Select "None" if you want to remove the association. Select another hub site if you want to link selected site to another hub site and click on the "Save" button.
This is how shared navigation appears after the top suite bar in all associated sites. You can manage this navigation from the hub site.
That’s it for this article. Hope this helps!!!