Forum Discussion
Using Communication site for intranet - need help?
Hi,
I really like modern layout in communication & team sites and now MS is introducing hub sites too. I am preparing our company intranet portal using Communication site as the home page which will contain news, events, quick links etc accessible to everyone in the organization and then creating subsites under this communication site for each department. We have around 15 departments (means 15 subsites), each subsite will contain in avg 5-10 document libraries in them because for now they will only be using their sites for documents. Ofcourse each subsite will have unique permissions so only department people will have access to their own site with exception of few users from other department may also be added to few libraries in other subsites. Total document libraries data size is around 400-500 GB for all subsites in total.
Other approach can be done is; communication site as home page then Team site (connected to office 365 group) for each department.
My question is, am I ok to use first approach? Or should I go with Team sites for each department? Pros/cons of subsites (under communication site) vs team sites for each department?
One other question is: Is there a way to inherit Communication site’s top navigation to it’s subsites? I enabled Inherit links under settings>Top Link Bar of subsite but it is not working?
Thanks in advance.
Thank you for quick replies. I think discussion is going into another direction. I really would not prefer to go for Teams for now. Like I mentioned before the needs are just for portal home for news/feeds etc and department sites for departments (HR, Finance etc) for document sharing.
Look like I still didn't get an answers to my initial questions? :)- The same applies, hence why I said Working Site / Team. You can inject either one. I just suggested using a Group connected Team site (Not Teams) instead of a bunch of comm sites so you can expand those later if you choose and control the permissions via the group.
But nothing is stopping you from just using Comm sites, it's just preference, Comm sites have the top nav, team sites don't it's on the left. That will be able to be changed before long however so that won't be the case in the near future but for now it's something to consider. With Group connected Team site you get more web parts etc as well.
But if all you care about is Libraries and nothing else in the future, I would just go with Comm sites, joined to Hub or hubs. Don't use Subsites, they really aren't the future and are missing some features as you have discovered.- What webparts/features are not available in subsites which are available in group connected team site?
How about Microsoft Teams?
A team site is fine, however modern collaboration is about more than documents. A subsite will constrain you, while a separate team site or starting with Microsoft Teams directly will give you room for growth. MS Teams gives you the team site, and then more.
The downside of MS Teams is that it is not mature yet, for example when it comes to document libraries.
Side note: mirroring an org chart for collaboration is usually not a good idea. I am saying that because you used the word "department".
One more recommendation: if your organization has more than 50 users, I would consider multiple communication sites joined in a hub.
- I've had plenty of success using departments for collaboration. That's the starting point and many organization still work in department silos. Not saying that should be your stop gap, but it's a good starting point to get everyone in, because departments like it or not are still a logical division and most still work together in that structure. You obviously would still have Teams / Sites based around functions / projects etc.
ChrisWebbTech I have also seen some failures from organizations just handing the org chart over to IT and thinking they were done with their Information Architecture.
My main point was that mirroring is not a good idea, and it doesn't hurt to give it some thought. Departments such as HR or Finance would probably have their dedicated teams, however it might not be the case for operations, Communications or IT. My advice: just look at how collaboration actually happens in your organization.
- And to add to Juan's comments. I would suggest doing Group Connected Team sites for your sub sites, these can be joined to your Hub as well, but it also allows the use of Microsoft Teams to sit on top of these sites so that you could also use them as well.
However, I took a little different approach. I had a Top level site with news etc. But I had a communication site for each department that wanted an org presence. A requirement was that these sites be open to the entire org. These comm sites they had power users that could create news on their sites etc. which would then roll up to the main Intranet homepage. These sites also had document libraries where the departments knew this is where they put unsecured, open to the org documents.
Then I also replicated a site for all the departments as their "Working" Sites/Teams where they used for working out of and put their private documents related to their groups in. Showed them how they could use "Move to" to move from Private working site to public when it was ready to be etc. Not every department wanted a public site, which is ok, but they all had Private working sites / Teams they worked from, the ones that wanted a Public facing comm site I set them up.
I had a hard rule that if you wanted your Site link put in the global nav, or on the homepage, it had to be open to the org. You don't want to play access request roulette since the global nav is not security trimmed yet. - The pattern used Today is to have "top sites" vs. an architecture based on subsites. What I would do here is to promote your communiction site as Hub Site and for the department sites think if you want to use the communication sites templates also or to use the modern team site one...in regards of inheriting navigation for your sites, Hub sites provide this
