SharePoint site structure

[Frank Smith]

Hi,

Our institution is new to both Office 365 and SharePoint ....

At the moment our IT department are creating SharePoint Sites without regard to any hierarchical site structure. Each Site is created alone without connection to any other Site.

IT have claimed that because we use a company Intranet product - MyDay, to link out to those Sites, then no hierarchy is necessary.

My view is we should be using a mix of Site and Subsites,  with Hub Site and Associated Sites

Can anyone advise about best practice ?

[#2]

I would really try to only look at HubSites and not to subsites. Especially since Microsoft best practice is not to use Subsites any more.

[#3]

Sub-sites are going away. Your IT team has it right.

[#4]

I agree that subsites are not the way to go, absolutely, and that hub sites with associated sites are.
My disagreement with IT is a lack of interest in both sub sites and hub sites to create any form of structure.
As it happens IT are now coming round to the idea.
At this point I must make it plain that IT are under enormous pressure in other areas so have little time to investigate. But seeds have been planted and changes are planned

[#5]

Can you explain why you NEED a subsite and not just a regular site under your organizational hub site?

[#6]

I now realize we don't necessarily need sub sites and our structure will take advantage of a Hub Site and associated site relationship.

My original point was that IT had not looked at conventional Site Collections nor Hub Sites

By the way I'd be interested in your, and anyone's opinion of the following educational curriculum structure that I have created, which appears to work....... but I'm wondering if there is something I've missed !

I have created Office 365 Teams for College Departments and College Courses. That works fine but there's no visible relationship between a Department and its associated Courses in Teams.

So, I've looked at the underpinning SharePoint Sites that were automatically created when the Office 365 Teams were created...........Basically I have made each Department Site a Hub Site, and associated the Course Sites that were related to that Department.....This now provides a Structure in SharePoint that gives me the visible relationship I need.........

However is this an acceptable process ?

Could Microsoft pull the plug ?

Frank

[#7]

My problem with the move to hub sites and associated sites over subsites is that each organization is only allowed (currently) 100 hub sites. In our company with 65000 staff and well over a hundred business units we can't all have a hub site and their use is being severely restricted by the central SharePoint team. Hopefully the 100 limit will be raised to something far larger in due course.

[#8]

My solution to this relationship problem is to extend the schema on O365 groups to include a relationship key. In our case all project groups have a Client name and ID key so on client sites we can query the graph for all related sites. This does require a process for capturing the details when the group is created and a web part to query the graph for related sites. This provides us with a view of relates sites whereas as a Hub Site is intend to roll up content which is not the purpose of this relationship.