Forum Discussion
Modern - all or nothing?
RobOK, you are correct that the default search in a Communication site is only within the site. You can then switch to everything. The Hub site that will come next year will solve this issue. From a Hub site you the search default will be through all connected sites.
The Hub site will also solve part of your Navigation issue. It will provide a shared top navigation for all connected sites. Default position of the current navigation of a modern teamsite will stay on the left.
Structural navigation will not be available though. The key word here is: performance. So you will have to manually create your Navigational nodes.
Search from a modern site is Microsoft Graph-driven. That simply is very different from classic SharePoint search. If you have highly structured content with lots of content types and heavily used meta deta, than Modern Search will not be very helpful.
Agreed! The "modern" features are half baked, at best. Likely due to the forcing function of the O365 groups.
I have started to use sub-site architecture to allow leveraging the pretty responsive site pages (modern). I will create a top level communication site and use it as splash page. Host the basic display content and other modern features like News. Then drop into a sub-site for content channels.
It's not a perfect solution but we've had some success.
The future looks bright, but the transition is tough. News feature, responsive pages, views by reference, design upgrades are all great advances, but there are core functions still missing. Hasn't made MVP for general use, IMHO.
Eric Adler wrote:
I have started to use sub-site architecture to allow leveraging the pretty responsive site pages (modern). I will create a top level communication site and use it as splash page. Host the basic display content and other modern features like News. Then drop into a sub-site for content channels.
.
Could you explain more about this approach... mainly, what do you use for Navigation and how does search work? I think a Comm site only searches within the site, not more broadly?
Our stumbling blocks are: Navigation (we like Structured Navigation on Top and nothing on the left), Search (there are no action links on the search results), and Document Library (although faster, are missing key bits).
Thanks,
Rob.RobOK, you are correct that the default search in a Communication site is only within the site. You can then switch to everything. The Hub site that will come next year will solve this issue. From a Hub site you the search default will be through all connected sites.
The Hub site will also solve part of your Navigation issue. It will provide a shared top navigation for all connected sites. Default position of the current navigation of a modern teamsite will stay on the left.
Structural navigation will not be available though. The key word here is: performance. So you will have to manually create your Navigational nodes.
Search from a modern site is Microsoft Graph-driven. That simply is very different from classic SharePoint search. If you have highly structured content with lots of content types and heavily used meta deta, than Modern Search will not be very helpful.
- Good information! The Hub site is probably what we are waiting for!
My organization has done pretty much what you did--it's a bummer to not be able to use the modern group-based sites' integrated Plans/Teams and such, but there's just no way to organize those sites (yet) to make them usable. If Hub sites give me the same kind of architecture a site collection with subsites can, I'll be all for it, but until then, it doesn't exist if I can't see it.
