Forum Discussion
Hub site hierarchy
Because I heard that subsites might be deprecated soon, because MS recommends flat hierarchies with Hub sites, I was thinking to renew our SPO site hierarchy.
That hierarchy is based on subsites and looks like this:
Customer 1 (Top Level)
- Location 1 of Customer 1 (Subsite Level 1)
- - Product 1 in Location 1 of Customer 1 (Subsite Level 2)
- - Product 2 in Location 1 of Customer 1
- Location 2 of Customer 1
- - Product 1 in Location etc..
- Location 3 of Customer 1
Customer 2
- Location 1 of Customer 2
- Location 2 of Customer 2
- Location 3 of Customer 2
Customer n...
So we have an SPO site for each customer, site of customer and product of customer. Those hierarchies can be navigated easily via links to site contents.
Unfortunately our approach seems now bad, because MS does not recommend subsites anymore. So what can we do?
With Hubsites I can only build a two-layer hierarchy. What I am showing above is not possible. Are there any recommendations?
Currently we are having already +2000 subsites, so those would have to be converted to +2000 site collections each?
9 Replies
- How many levels do you have? At Ignite Microsoft disclosed "Hubs association" so you could have up to three levels...by the way, with modern pages and a good navigation I believe you should perfectly to model your scenario
jcgonzalezmartin I have three levels: Customer => Plant of customer => product of customer. So this will be possible in the spring of next year? With hubs?
David_Elsner- I may be missing or overlooking something, but it seems like a hub for each customer, and then any number of sites related to that customer can be connected to that hub. In place of subsites, they would all be Site Collections connected to the Customer Hub. You can leverage Hub navigation for the connected Site Collections and search would be scoped to just the that hub and the connected sites. Are you inheriting anything with existing subsite topology or is it just for a logical grouping?
If you want all of them to have all modern capabilites, then you have to ”move them”.
One way is to “modernize” your Customer-level and connect them to a “sales hub”. Then everything is kind off connected. But you won’t have the modern capabilities in the subsites as Teams/Groups and so on.
Nicklas Lundqvist With modern capabilities you mean the O365 group things, right? So a MS Team, Group Calendar and so on?
Well, those I do not need really. We use that in other scenarios. But I am just concerned that in some years it will not be possible anymore to create subsites... could this happen?Exactly those. And for your other question, not being able to create subsites in the future. Since Microsoft is moving to node based “thinking” there is a chance/risk that subsites will not be possible in the future.
I think that’s why they are aiming on delivering the possibility to nest hub sites. I also think there’s a roadmap entry about that.
My “gut feeling” is that you should try to stay clear of subsites as a “navigation tool”. But then I don’t have all the insights in the roadmap of sharepoint sites either 🙂
Also, there is no tool (natively) to move a subsite to its own collection in a good way at least meaning if you use them you might end up in a rather tedious manual work later on.
