Forum Discussion
Roadmap for an Enterprise Intranet Home/Landing Page with Search focus
We're currently in the middle of our journey towards a modern intranet and are testing out the Sharepoint Online functionality as a potential solution.
One thing that is hindering us is understanding the solution for the company homepage itself with regards to curated content and a full-featured search. Traditionally, this was addressed with a root Sharepoint site collection with subsites and subsites and subsites, etc. Standard user behaviour on the company homepage is to search for content that may be relevant to them, such as people policies - and in that solution, they would be able to find them.
However, in this newer hub model the search can only include results from the hub - and for a large organisation, we would have hubs for each department - so what about the homepage? Some sort of starting point with relevant news which can search the entire Sharepoint/Office environment and link to the important Hubs. How do we address this need?
There doesn't seem to be any mention of the ability to adjust the scope of the modern search of a particular site to ALSO include results of other hubs/sites - and for that matter, people results. This is the main reason why we can't succeed with a Sharepoint intranet homepage - the fact that the search can only provide results within the controlled hub environment, and we don't want just 1 hub, nor do we want to replicate information just to support search.
I have read through the hub site planning document, but it avoids this question and assumes we have a separate intranet homepage solution somehow (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/planning-hub-sites).
2 Replies
- Search in modern is still in it's infancy... so I think we all share the same concerns and issues that you have. One little known feature of the search page, is that you can actually move up scope by using the breadcrumbs on the search page.
Yes, by default, it will search the hub site. But if you notice in the breadcrumb it says "SharePoint" > "Your Hub Site". If you click the SharePoint breadcrumb, it will allow you to search across your entire environment.
You may be able to chalk this up to training, at least until we get a more robust search implementation in Modern.Yes it's definitely an issue for us at the moment, we would appreciate even a simple addition to the settings to allow us to change the search scope from local to global for a site... oh well! In the meantime we may have to build out our initial intranet hub site to include things like HR policies to support a search experience, and then shift these around later.
