Planning your SharePoint hub sites
Hub sites help you organize your intranet. Getting the most value from hub sites requires some up-front planning. Read on to find out more about hub sites and how you can plan for them.
Setting the stage
SharePoint hub sites provide an important building block for your intranet. They're the "connective tissue" you use when organizing families of team sites and communication sites together.
One of the key principles of modern intranets based on Microsoft SharePoint is that each unit of work should get a separate site collection. This helps you to manage governance and growth over time. Each communication site and Microsoft 365 group-connected team site is created as a site collection that can have its own permissions. A hub site (most commonly created from a communication site) should also be considered its own unit of work that brings together many other sites.
In the past, many organizations used subsites to create connective tissue for their intranets. They used the site collection's shared navigation to connect sites and the hierarchical structure of subsite relationships to nest sites within sites. However, subsites don't give any room for flexibility and change. Since subsites are a physical construct reflected in the URL for content, if you reorganize your business relationships, you break all the intranet relationships in your content. Subsites can also create challenges when it comes to governance because many features (including policy features like retention and classification) in SharePoint apply to all sites within the site collection, whether you want them to or not. This means that you must frequently enable a feature for the entire site collection, even if it's only applicable to one subsite.
What is the one thing that we can guarantee is going to happen in every business? Change! As your organization evolves, you need intranets that make it easy to align experiences with the way you work and that can adapt to the inevitable changes in the way you work. This is a key benefit provided by SharePoint hub sites; they model relationships as links, rather than hierarchy or ownership, so that you can adapt to the changes in the way you work in a dynamic, changing world.
Getting started
Before you start making hubs sites, let's recap the three things hub sites give you:
Shared navigation and brand
Roll-up of content and search
A home destination for the hub
Now let's think about the information you're trying to share throughout your intranet, and consider the business outcomes you're trying to enable.
An intranet can play many roles in an organization. It's an internally facing site, a place to communicate important news, and a collaboration platform. It's also a way to showcase your corporate culture. It can be the foundation of your digital workplace. An intranet lets you tell stories and share information. Empowering employees with a voice on your intranet can provide a way to move to a culture of collaboration that enables your organization to transform and adapt to change.
Many successful intranets include the following elements:
Communication: For example, a home page that includes news from around the organization to keep employees informed, overall navigation, links to key tools and information, internal marketing promotions, and a place to engage employees around important topics.
Content: A place for the functional parts of the organization, such as Human Resources (HR), Legal, and Information Technology (IT), to offer their services to the rest of the organization. For example, the HR part of the intranet could be where employees can find out how many vacation days they have left, whether their benefits program offers vision or dental coverage, or what training is available for individual roles. The Legal area might be where employees can find a sample non-disclosure agreement they can execute prior to having a conversation with a prospective vendor.
Actions and activities: Links to the time-tracking system or the expense report form and a place where managers can approve expenses or timesheets.
Collaboration: Places where teams can get work done and where role or topic-based communities can share knowledge and leverage expertise across the organization and with external partners in the extended enterprise.
Culture: Stories and places that allow employees to engage or learn, including profiles, communities and clubs, and even images and branding that reflect the organizational structure. Sometimes even the intranet name embodies the culture. For example, an electric utility has an intranet called "The Grid" with messaging and promotions to make sure that "no one works off The Grid."
Mobility: The ability for employees to get work done from any device while they're on the go.
Search: The ability for employees to find content even if they don't know where it lives.
The emphasis for each of these elements can vary based on organizational priorities and to some extent, the digital maturity of the organization. Microsoft 365 provides three main building blocks to help you create your intranet in a way that allows you to configure experiences that align with your organization, your employees, and your readiness. Different organizations will use the building blocks in different ways, but the building blocks themselves reflect common patterns that organizations use to get work done:
Team sites (collaboration)
Communication sites (communication)
Hub sites (connection)
At their core, the three types of building blocks share a common structure. For example, they share the same set of internal web parts. However, there are some fundamental differences in intent, usage expectations, governance (including how they are created), and how and which web parts you might use on each type of site.
| Team site |
Communication site |
Hub site |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary business objective |
Collaborate When you want to create a place where the members of a work group or project team can work together on project deliverables, plan an event, track status, or exchange ideas, you want a team site. Team sites are connected by default to a Microsoft 365 group to deliver a full range of communication and collaboration tools, including Microsoft Teams and Planner. |
Communicate When you want to broadcast a message, tell a story, share content for viewing (but not editing), or showcase services or people, you want a communication site. Communication site owners often want to include an engagement component - for example an "Ask Business Development" area on a site communicating information about business development. This is a great place to connect a Viva Engage community. |
Connect When you want to create a shared experience for a family of related sites—to discover related content by rolling up site activity and news, organize related sites so that they share a common navigation, and apply a common look and feel. |
| Content authors |
All members are content authors who jointly create and edit content. |
Small number of content authors and a much larger number of content readers or consumers. |
Hub site owner defines the shared experiences for hub navigation and theme. Hub site members create content on the hub site as with any other SharePoint site. Owners and members of the sites associated with the parent hub create content on individual sites. |
| Governance (as allowed for your organization based on the settings in the Security & Compliance center) |
Norms typically determined by the team. Practices are aligned in the best way to get work done. |
Policies often determined by the organization to ensure consistency of experience and effective management of organizational information. |
Governance determined by each owner of the associated site based on the type of site and organizational policies. The best experience for visitors is achieved when everyone has at least read permissions for associated sites (but this is not required). |
| Permissions |
Microsoft 365 group, plus SharePoint groups and permission levels |
SharePoint group |
Same as original site type. Hub sites do not alter an associated site's permissions - but you may add a "reader" group to the hub to make it easier to provide read access to associated sites. For more information, see: Hub permissions. |
| Created by |
Site owner (unless this has been disabled in your organization) or admin. |
Site owner (unless this has been disabled in your organization) |
SharePoint site administrators and above in Microsoft 365 |
| Examples |
- Project team working together to complete deliverables and manage tasks. - Holiday party planning committee planning the annual get-together. - HR performance management team. - Executive committee—different leadership groups within the organization. - Extranet site to work with Partner A. |
- Travel team publishing guidelines about corporate travel. - Policies and procedures. - Micro-site for a new corporate initiative. - Resources for the sales team for a product or service. |
- HR hub that provides a connection and roll-up for all HR functions, such as benefits, compensation, performance management, talent acquisition, and a manager portal. - Sales hub providing enterprise resources for the Sales organization and connecting regional sales team and communication sites. - Location-specific hub that groups the communication and team sites for a specific location (for example, the New York office). |
What should be a hub site?
Hub sites complement the search experience by helping you discover information in context.
One of the biggest challenges with intranet design is figuring out how the intranet navigation should be organized. In the new world where all team and communication sites are peer site collections, information architects must think about creating experiences that will allow intranet users to find what they need in multiple "find" scenarios:
I know it exists, and I know where it is
I know it exists, but I don't know where it is
I don't know if it exists
These scenarios are enabled with a combination of navigation, search, and discovery (or serendipity) and should be a factor in how you design and organize your hub sites. One of the important capabilities that hub sites enable is the serendipitous discovery of information because they can surface contextually relevant content from sites you may not follow but are associated with the hub. The SharePoint start page was built to support discovery and search across the entire organization's content, but if you already have a particular context in mind, hub sites can be very helpful in narrowing those experiences down to a handful of related sites.
As a starting point in your hub planning, think about hub sites for key functions that your users need to get work done—for example: HR, Finance, Communications or Public Relations, Legal, and IT. These functions may be represented in different organizational departments or business units in large organizations or combined into the role of a few people in smaller organizations.
Let's take HR as an example. HR often encompasses the following sub-functions:
Benefits
Pay and compensation
Talent acquisition or recruiting
Performance management
Professional development or training
Manager portal
Using the guiding principle of creating a site for each unit of work, you can think about an HR family of sites that could include six functional sites for each of these functions plus an HR hub that connects the related sites to provide an overall HR experience. This is another way to think about the value of hub sites: they allow you to create an experience that improves information discovery for a specific context (in our example, for employees looking for HR information).
In the classic intranet model, you might have created an HR site and used subsites to support each HR function. In the flat world of modern SharePoint, the HR family is connected using the HR hub to provide the connective tissue for navigation within the family and to provide an opportunity to serendipitously discover content on a related member of the family when users navigate to the HR home. For example, if you're on the HR hub reading a news announcement about open enrollment because you're in the process of onboarding a new employee, you might be happy to know that a new version of the "Welcome to the Company" onboarding toolkit was just released on the Talent Acquisition site. Likewise, if you're trying to find the HR team's office sharing policy, you'll appreciate being able to limit your search to only the HR-affiliated sites, rather than the entire organization.
You don't have to have a hub site for every function. However, when a function provides multiple logically different services (as in the HR example), it's a good practice to create a hub site to provide a single starting place for your users. Often, intranet users start their exploration with browsing. Hub sites help combine the benefits of browsing ("I know this is an HR topic") with the benefits of a more narrowly scoped search ("I want to find information about vision benefits, not the company's strategic vision."). Even if the users don't know which sub-function provides a service, they can navigate to the HR hub and then, using the search scope provided by the hub, search (or navigate) within the HR hub to quickly find what they need.
Some organizational functions have an enterprise-wide scope but a regional or product execution. For example, think about a Sales department that may have sites for sales regions and sites for location-based offices. This type of function has always presented a challenge to hierarchical intranet content organization using subsites. Do we make the Southeast Sales site a subsite of the Southeast Region site or the Global Sales site? And, what happens when a state within the southeast region is allocated to a new region; for example, from the southeast region to the northeast region? This type of dynamic organizational movement creates a nightmare for intranet organization if you use subsites, but not with hub sites. Picking a hub may create some angst because an individual site can be associated with only one hub, but keep in mind that content from a site can appear on multiple hubs. You can customize sources for the following web parts on a hub:
Note
An organization can have up to 2,000 hub sites. You might not need a hub site for every function and it's important to do some planning before you create hubs.
There is no "one size fits all" way to determine how to align sites to a hub in this scenario. Always start by answering these questions:
Who is your audience and what do they need to accomplish?
How do the people who need the information get their work done?
Align your hub to create experiences that enable the user first. You may want to think about how people in each work group think about the work they do by aligning regional sites with the function, since sales content for the northeast is more likely to be organized similarly to sales content for the southeast than it will be for the southeast regional office. But this is very much an "it depends" situation. In some organizations, it will make much more sense to organize all functions around a regional hub than a functional hub. With hub sites multi-geo capabilities, you can create a better user experience associating Austria Sales with the Austria hub and not the global Sales hub. In this type of scenario, you can use a link on the Austria sales site to connect it to the global Sales hub and add each regional sales site to the Hub navigation for global sales.
Note
A site can only associate with a hub family. However, hub families can be connected to one another using links either on the page or in hub navigation. In addition, hubs can also be associated to other hubs to create an extended search scope for your hub families. For example, you may have a hub called Northeast Region Sales that you want to "connect" to a Global Sales hub. You can now associate a hub to another hub to expand search results across multiple hubs in your organization.
A good practice is to start with a consistent approach for all functions that have a pattern, such as Sales. If you align region-specific functions to the regional hub, do that for all functions. Either approach is valid, but from a usability perspective, it helps to be consistent.
How should I organize my hub site?
Hub sites provide two primary organizational experiences that you should think about as part of the hub planning process. Though creating a hub site must be done by SharePoint site administrators and [above] in Microsoft 365, planning, managing, and organizing the hub site is the responsibility of the hub site owner. The organizing concepts for hubs are:
Association
Navigation
Association
A site becomes part of a hub family by Associating a SharePoint site with a hub site. When creating a hub site, SharePoint Administrators can allow only certain site owners to associate sites with the hub.
After a SharePoint Administrator gives a site owner permission to associate their sites with a hub site, the site owner can then choose to associate the sites with the hub. When they do, the site inherits the hub site theme and shared navigation. Content from their site will roll up to the hub site in web parts where the source is "all sites in the hub," and the site will be included in the hub site search scope.
Associating with the hub does not automatically add the site to the hub navigation. Hub site owners determine which sites are included in the navigation. They can also configure the News, Sites, Events, and Highlighted content to roll up activity from all associated sites or only selected 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. Something you may want to consider is adjusting permissions on the associated sites after you have assembled your hub family or adding a hub "read" permission group to the hub and adding that permission group to associated sites.
Navigation
The hub site owner determines which sites are reflected in the shared navigation and can also include links to other resources. This navigation appears at the top, below the suite bar. Most of the time, you will want to add associated sites to your hub navigation. That's one of the benefits of the experiences that you can enable with a hub. Your hub navigation can have up to three levels, which lets you organize your hub family in a way that helps users discover and find relevant content.
Note
The default navigation menu style for team sites hub navigation will be cascading.
However, you may not want to add every associated site to your navigation and you may want to consider adding sites that aren't associated to the navigation. Consider the following as you plan your hub navigation.
Do you want to add private or restricted access sites to the navigation? Maybe. For example, HR may want to associate their private team site with the HR hub to make it more convenient for HR team members. But, the HR hub owner may not want to display a link to the HR team site in the shared navigation for the HR hub because this would make the private HR site more discoverable by everyone in the organization, who will get an access challenge when they click the link to the HR team site. If you add private sites to hub navigation, consider using audience targeting so that the link only appears for members of the private site. In another scenario, there may be a site that is "semi-private" that you want interested people to discover. For example, you might have a community that wants to restrict membership to people with a specific expertise, but also wants to discover experts across the organization. In this scenario, users might get an access denied/request access message, but the site owner is prepared and wants to grant access to interested people.
Tip
If you add links to private sites in your hub navigation and don't plan to use audience targeting, consider adding (restricted) or (private) or (external) to the link name to help users understand that they may not have access to the navigation link.
Do you want to add sites that are not associated with the hub to the navigation? Maybe. Since an individual site can only be associated with one hub, adding sites that aren't associated with your hub helps provide a way to connect your hub to related sites. For example, if you choose to associate functions within a region with a regional hub instead of the global function hub, you could add navigation links from the function hub to each of the region sites. For example, if you have a function hub for HR, you could add the regional HR sites (Northeast HR, Southeast HR, and so on) to the navigation of the HR hub to create a comprehensive HR experience. Note that when you do this, the news and activity in the regional HR sites will not show up on the HR hub (but they will show up on the regional hub). And, when you navigate from the HR hub to the regional HR site, you will be on a site that has the regional hub navigation and theme, not the HR navigation and theme. There is nothing inherently wrong or bad about this scenario, but you should be aware of the implications when you plan your hub navigation experiences
Tip
Don't associate extranet sites with the hub if you don't want extranet users to see the shared navigation. Consider just adding the external sites to the hub navigation so that internal users have quick access to relevant extranet sites.
Can I make just one hub site for my whole organization?
There is no requirement to have more than one hub for your organization, but you should think about what this means for information organization and discovery. An advantage to having just one hub is that every site in the intranet will share a consistent top navigation. However, since every site can also share consistent global navigation in the App Bar, you may want to consider taking advantage of more than one hub.
If you have only one hub, you'll miss the ability to easily surface related information in context and the ability to easily define a search scope for related content. For example, if you have a single enterprise hub, it will be harder to surface just HR-related news on the HR site. Even small organizations may find that restricting the context in which users find information is helpful in managing information overload. We now have the ability to create a hierarchy of hubs to create hub to hub associations. This allows you to create a network of hubs that roll-up to each other to create connections and additional search scopes. When hubs are associated with each other, content can be searched for and displayed on hubs up to three levels of association.
How many sites should I associate to a hub?
Though there is technically no limit to the number of sites you can associate to a hub, there are practical guidelines to consider so that you will get the optimal benefit of using hubs in your information architecture (IA).
As with most IA decisions, you should first focus on the outcomes you are trying to achieve by using hubs and then use that goal to help determine a practical number of sites to associate to a hub. A good place to start is to focus on the key benefits of using a hub to organize sites.
| Key Benefit/Outcome Goal | Practical Guidance |
|---|---|
| Share a common theme across all sites | In general, you would not establish a hub when the only outcome goal is to share a consistent theme for all sites. For more information about SharePoint site themes, see: SharePoint site theming - PowerShell cmdlets | Microsoft Learn. |
| Display links to all sites in the hub in site navigation | Technically no more than 500, practically and from a performance perspective, no more than 100. There is a technical limit to the number of navigation nodes that you can have in a SharePoint site. However, unless you are using audience targeting to limit the number of sites that a given user sees, showing 500 navigation links would create a very challenging user experience to read. From a user experience and performance perspective, the recommended number of links is no more than 100. If you want to display all sites in your hub in your navigation, the recommended maximum number of sites per hub is 100. |
| Display a security trimmed, dynamic list of all sites in the hub without written code. | No more than 99. The sites web part can be set to filter for "all sites in the hub" up to a maximum of 99 sites. |
| Shared search scope for all sites in the hub. | Approximately 2,000. Technically, there is no hard limit to the number of sites you can associate to a hub from a search perspective. However, you could experience performance issues when you have large numbers of sites associated to a hub. Consider your outcome goal - do you really need a site for each "topic", or would a document library achieve your goals? You can have 2000 lists and libraries in a site collection and within each library, you can have up to 30 million files and folders. You may find that using multiple document libraries in a site may achieve your outcome goals if the primary purpose of your hub is to search across related files. If you need a site for each topic, you should consider the challenges of managing large number of site collections associated to a single hub and whether there may be an alternative approach to get the outcome goals you want. |
Additional important considerations
Finding hubs if you have more than one. Hubs are an important building block for your intranet. Here are some ways you can make your hub sites discoverable:
Add hubs to global navigation. Add your hubs to the global navigation for your tenant in the SharePoint app bar.
Add key hubs to the SharePoint start page. Pin your hub sites to the Featured links area of the SharePoint start page. Encourage all users to "follow" hub sites.
Reaching the right audience for news. Hub sites help you bring news to the right people at the right time and in the right context. News doesn't flow down to associated sites, only up from the associated site to the hub. If you want the broadest reach for your news, publish it to the hub site. To make hub news more visible, you may want to have two news web parts on your home page: one for news published on the hub home and another that includes news rolled up from associated sites (all or only selected sites).
Hub naming conventions. Think about naming conventions for hub sites to make them more discoverable. Some options include names such as HR Central, HR Hub, HR Portal. Try to choose a consistent naming convention for all hub sites.
Getting ready to hub. Once you have planned your hubs, you can transform an existing site (preferably a communication site) to become a hub site or create a new communication site and make it a hub site. Then, you can add and configure the web parts and navigation on the hub site to emphasize the hub capabilities.
Subsites. Hub sites solve many or most of the use cases for which you previously used subsites. We recommend using hub sites going forward to organize the sites in your intranet. However, subsites will continue to be supported as a classic feature, and we'll add the new team site template as a subsite option.
Should your home site be a hub? It depends. Consider making your home site a hub if you have a unique set of sites that represent your "official" intranet where you want a distinct brand and search scope that you want to distinguish from other sites in the tenant. Consider leaving your home site as a "regular" site if you plan to have multiple hubs and you want your users to leverage the SharePoint app bar for global navigation. Every site in the intranet does not have to be connected to a hub if your home site is not a hub. Some sites may be part of a hub and have both local and hub navigation but other sites may only have local navigation. In this scenario, your intranet global navigation is provided by the app bar, not a hub.
Use hub sites when they align with your business outcomes and solve a need for your users.
Need more help?
If you have technical questions about this topic, you might find it helpful to post them on the SharePoint discussion forum. It's a great resource for finding others who have worked with similar issues or who have encountered the same situation.
Principal author: Susan Hanley, MVP
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/susanhanley
- Website: www.susanhanley.com