Forum Discussion
Sharepoint online permissions inheritance subsites
Now that you understand how inheritance works, you may want to reconsider your decision to create subsites in the site collection. Many of the new features in SPO, i.e, Office 365 Groups and the soon to be released Hub sites will work best with separate site collections that do not have any subsites.
There are many good reasons to have subsites, but there are also many benefits to having separate site collections. It can be confusing to have a new "site collection" that only has one site (and is not really a collection of anything), but that is just the nature of sharepoint architecture.
Thanks Thierry and Juan Carlos. You confirmed my doubts.
I will stop inheriting before creating new groups.
jcgonzalezmartin wrote:
Thierry is correct...if you don't break inheritance for your subsites and you create new Groups, you are indeed creating them in the parent site so that's the reason why they also appear in the other subsites
Now that you understand how inheritance works, you may want to reconsider your decision to create subsites in the site collection. Many of the new features in SPO, i.e, Office 365 Groups and the soon to be released Hub sites will work best with separate site collections that do not have any subsites.
There are many good reasons to have subsites, but there are also many benefits to having separate site collections. It can be confusing to have a new "site collection" that only has one site (and is not really a collection of anything), but that is just the nature of sharepoint architecture.
Under modern architecture if we create site collections instead of subsites for a department how can we make sure all site collections related to a department will inherit same permissions groups.As Ian stated, you can't do that and in fact you will end up with multiple groups which may not be desirable. This begs the question, why do you think that you need another site? in many cases adding a few more document libraries may be sufficient.
Another related option is to use MS teams and then the Department will get a Group to contain its membership, a SP Site for its documents, and separate channels to keep things organized (each channel gets a folder in the default doc library to help keep the files organized-but the all have the same permissions)
I can certainly see the benefit of this flat architecture but it forces you to use the Content Type Hub if you want to create columns and content types that can be used across site collections.
In my particular case I need access to a custom list from several sites (lookup column) and this requirement alone forces a subsite architecture with the list defined in the root site. It doesn't help that creating a subsite from a modern site offers only the Classic site template (I know we can create a modern homepage for this site but it's a fundamentally different type of site)
All very thought provoking :-)
- Yep, there are some use cases such as the one you mention that cannot be solved Today with an Architectural Design based on Site Collections provisioning, but it's also true that is the pattern Microsoft is promoting Today (I'm also recommending it to customers). Agree with Dean here: manage metadata can be a good alternative here for your scenario + use all the pnp stuff as a foundation for re-using sites and columns definitions
I fully agree with Dean as well.
- Glad to help!!
