SharePoint Hub Sites New In Office 365 – Let’s Explore
Recently, Microsoft officially announced the release of SharePoint hub sites which is provided to all Office 365 subscribers. The announcement was made in the conference of Microsoft Ignite at last fall. Basically, a hub is a template of the new site for a particular type of SharePoint site. This feature is only available for SharePoint online users but, Microsoft stated that they will append these features and site templates in the on-premises edition of SharePoint 2019.
This means that the platform of SharePoint online will be offering templates to develop team sites, hub sites, and communication sites to gather them all together. Well, the major trouble with on-premises edition was the increase in the site collection and continuous growth in sub-sites as well. This infrastructure causes the problem at the time of mitigating the sites and content and hence, causes the hiccup if the migration on the cloud does not takes place. Well, after the release of hub site and communication site templates, now it is clear that what all templates were required to fill the gaps. Let us explore more about SharePoint Hub Sites new in Office 365.
What Is A Hub Site In SharePoint?
A hub site is a fundamental location where one can link to other sites. This will be creating a global navigation layer for all the associated sites. In general, a hub is a platform to collect and display all the information from connected sites. The team of Microsoft has define the things in the following manner :
- Cross-site Navigation: Grows the visibility and navigation among all the connected sites.
- Content Rollup: Have a look upon aggregated information and come up with associated site activities.
- Consistent Look-and-feel: Set up a common theme for improving awareness of visitors in connected sites.
- Scoped Search: Completely focus upon the searching of content that is placed within the associated sites of a hub.
It is possible to append team sites as well as communication sites in the hub site but, only one site can be connected to a single hub. It is impossible to cascade the hubs by coming in touch with all of them. This is making a sense because one hub site pushes down the common look settings and feel to all the connected sites. So, if you can connect with one hub to another, surely you are creating a lot of complicated situations.
The above-represented diagram comprises 3 level of collection sites that will strictly navigate only within their sub-sites. However, a single link between any of the 2 sites along with their sub-sites can be done manually. Doing this kind activity on hub site will:
- Involve the collection of top-level site “parent” to the global navigation of hub site
- Come out with the news and articles that are published on all the communication sites through the content roll-ups, and
- Connects all the parent’s and children’s hub site with the associated sites web part that seems like an Office 365 SharePoint Home, with the pane for each site.
Advantages and Disadvantages of SharePoint Hub Sites
Through different videos and articles, Microsoft suggested its users that hub is not a new portal; it appears with already existing portal sites.
Additional Information: The term ‘portal’ means a way to locate the group of sites, which have something unique in them.
The advantage of Hub sites in SharePoint is connection and disconnection ability of sites from several hubs. This renders flexibility to the information of intranet architecture and enables users to modify data easily. There is no doubt in stating that user interface is far better and easy to understand. Another advantage of SharePoint Hub site is the capability of promoting the brand component down from the Hub site to the connected sites. The common branding renders an “information scent” element, which helps enterprise users to understand the group of sites connected because of the shared logo, color scheme, etc. Now, these things are no more complicated with no typing of program coding. All this means that if a site is to be migrated from Hub A to Hub B then, the interface change will be felt immediately after switching.
Observational Verdict
Sharepoint Hub Sites new in Office 365 – this feature is an amazing way to dive into users conversations that are down on several projects simultaneously. Microsoft claims that the Hub site enables a good governance. Now, there will be no more complications in migrating from one hub to another. Apart from all this, Microsoft also claims that the interface of Hub site will work well on smartphones too.
