SharePoint hub sites new in Office 365
Published Sep 26 2017 06:00 AM 242K Views
Microsoft

Today at Ignite 2017, we announced SharePoint hub sites, a new building block of the intranet, to bring together related sites to roll up news and activity, to simplify search, and to create cohesion with shared navigation and look-and-feel.

 

The digital workplace is dynamic and ever changing. Business goals and team structures evolve and change – often frequently. SharePoint helps your organization adapt, by connecting your workplace with intelligent content management and intranets that give you the tools to share and work together, and to inform and engage people across the organization. And now it gets easier to organize your intranet dynamically.

 

You can associate multiple team sites and communication sites to model and promote an intranet that reflects the way your people organize. Hub sites provide common navigational structure, look and feel, and search across associated sites. Hub sites also aggregate news and activities from associated sites and display the roll-up on the hub site’s home page.

SharePoint hub sites bring together related sites to roll up news and activity, and to create cohesion with shared navigation and look-and-feel.SharePoint hub sites bring together related sites to roll up news and activity, and to create cohesion with shared navigation and look-and-feel.

You can use SharePoint hub sites to organize concepts, teams, divisions, or resources throughout your businesses. Let’s dive into the details.

Create a cohesive set of related sites with shared navigation, look and feel

A hub site brings consistency across sites from the top down. When a team site or communication site is associated to a hub site, it inherits common characteristics, including:

 

  • Navigation – Define top navigation in the hub site that is inherited by associated sites.
  • Theme – Define the look and feel of the hub site, and that theme remains consistent across associated sites.
  • Logo – A logo on a site is like the green sticker on a map that says, “You are here.” It’s an important identifier of the site you are visiting, and the information and people the site represents. A consistent logo defined by the hub site and used by associated sites says, “You are here, and you have not left.”

SharePoint hub sites bring together team sites and communication sites together into more centralized locations within your intranet.SharePoint hub sites bring together team sites and communication sites together into more centralized locations within your intranet.

Roll up and present a consolidated view of news and activities

Throughout the lifecycle of your projects, your launches, your internal campaigns, it is important to increase visibility, awareness and discoverability beyond the core day-to-day people, and not expect everyone to have to drill into the various related sites, but more represent a clear, broad picture of what’s happening across sites, aka, what’s happening across projects and initiatives. Team sites and communication sites push content and information up to the hub site level with:

  • News aggregation –After you create and publish a news article on an associated site, the news article surfaces on SharePoint home, in the SharePoint mobile apps, and now on the hub site’s home page.
  • Combined site activities – It’s important to know what is happening within sites, so you can prioritize your focus and your time. Site activities are visible on a team site’s home page, and on the site’s card on SharePoint home. Now, site activities will roll up from each associated sites so that they are visible on the hub site’s home page, so you can see what happening across related sites, instead of having to view activity site by site.
  • Scoped search – When you search for content from a hub site, results include content from all associated sites. Because associated sites are related, search from the hub site home page increases relevance, and enhances content discovery.

Create hub sites and associate team and communication sites

It is easy for admins to create one or more hub sites. After a hub site is created, site owners can associate existing team sites and communication sites with the hub site, or to associate a new site while creating a site from SharePoint home in Office 365Soon you will be able to create an associated site directly from within the hub site itself.

Site owners can associate an existing team site or communication site with a hub site.Site owners can associate an existing team site or communication site with a hub site.

Site owners can associate an existing team site or communication site with a hub site.

  1. Click the gear icon in the upper right of the site.
  2. Click Site information.
  3. In the Edit site information pane that appears, click the Hub site drop-down menu and choose the right hub site to join.

Note that team sites and communication sites can only be associated to one hub site. And as easy as it is to join a site to a hub site, you, too, can un-join from one. This is the power of a dynamic intranet, one that can change and adapt with the ebb and flow of your ever-changing business landscape.        

Access hub sites and associated sites with the SharePoint mobile app

The SharePoint mobile app helps keep your work moving forward by providing quick access to all your sites, news and the team members you work with, and search to find content and people across your organization.

 

With the addition of SharePoint hub sites, the SharePoint mobile app will be updated to natively render hub sites, and their pages, news, and content, with smooth navigation between associated sites and the scoped search experience. Find what you need on the go, and get going!

SharePoint hub sites and their associated sites are easy to access and navigate via the SharePoint mobile app.SharePoint hub sites and their associated sites are easy to access and navigate via the SharePoint mobile app.

Moving forward and growing together

Team sites, communication sites and now hub sites – as well as classic publishing sites and sites for applications – are building blocks of your intranet. SharePoint connects the workplace so that you can share, manage, and find the content, knowledge, and apps you need, on any device.

 

As you modernize and extend your intranet to support collaboration and communication, SharePoint will support you and your teams now and into the future.

 

Let us know what you need next. We are always open to feedback via UserVoice and continued dialog in the SharePoint community in the Microsoft Tech Community —and we always have an eye on tweets to @SharePoint. Let us know.

 

—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team

 

Additional materials:

 

FAQs

Q: When can I expect to see SharePoint hub sites appear in my Office 365 tenant?

A: UPDATED [5.7.2018] | A: SharePoint hub sites have now been rolled out to 100% worldwide in Office 365, including enterprise, education and government customers. Also, the SharePoint mobile apps have been updated in the production versions to fully support them.

 

Q: Can I join one SharePoint hub site under another hub site?

A: No, you won't be able to join a SharePoint hub site to another hub site.

 

Q: Can a team site or a communication site be joined to more than one SharePoint hub site?

A: No. It will only be possible to join a site to one hub site at a time. It is possible to link to various un'joined sites in the top naviogation. And it will be possible, within seconds, to join and/or un'join a site as the business changes.

 

Q: Can a hub site replace my current organizational portal?

A: Hub sites are designed to let you dynamically organize closely related sites, bringing together similar projects, and binding related assets, and presenting common activity. Customers with portals that include customization beyond the web parts and extensions that SharePoint Framework currently supports are likely to continue using the SharePoint publishing infrastructure, which continues to be fully supported both in SharePoint Server on-premises and SharePoint Online.

 

Q: When should I use a team site, and when should I use a communication site?

A: Your SharePoint team site lets you share content, knowledge, news and apps with your group as collaborate on a project. A communication site lets you tell your story, share your work, and showcase your product across the organization.

112 Comments
Bronze Contributor

I kind of like it, though you're "killing" me here with the name "hub" :p I was about to use "hub" instead of "communication site" internally. Now hub sites that group team sites would sound confusing, when all the other commsites would also be names hubs, but are not technical hubs :p 

 

  • are Hub Sites a new template or does an existing Communication Site automatically become a Hub site when an active link is created?
  • are any other content types aggregated at the top, apart from the ones mentioned?

 

Brass Contributor

This looks great, a nice way to tie everything together, but you always announce these features when i'm trying to implement something similar and then give a release date thats out of scope for my project! A fuzzy one at that, is it going to be January next year or May?

 

You mention adding team and communication sites, does that include site collections or other hubs? E.g can i have a company intranet home hub with hubs beneath it for each department and so on?

Iron Contributor
lol - within my organisation I have been promoting a "hub" approach and using the name "hub" for a long time now (should I have copyrighted it lol) and also implemented this in a manual fashion - Will, be interested to see the devil in the detail and how this impacts what I already have. Will also be interested to see if team sites can be associated with multiple hubs? It sounds like "not", as there is reference to sharing a common navigation. This seems to not appreciate that a Team can belong to multiple hubs. eg, I have a Team that sits inside a Heathcare tower, butn also sits inside a "Software development" Line of service
Brass Contributor

Can O365 Group SharePoint sites be added to a Hub site?

Bronze Contributor
Did I see this correct that there was a checkbox to "make this site a hub" ? Will this work only for communication sites, or can a teamsite also be a hub site?
Deleted
Not applicable

Can a hub site be associated to another hub site.

Bronze Contributor

@Deleted had the same question, though I doubt it. I don't see a feasable way to present shared navigation, if a site is part of multiple hub sites, which top navigation and theme would it show?

Iron Contributor

Will this be available for SharePoint On-Prem?

Iron Contributor

Any word on how to get Yammer of Teams involved in Hubs

 

From a Yammer perspective I've always thought about aggregating or rolling up various groups into it's own feed. At my previous employer our business units came under one of 5 or so sectors. It would have been good to aggregate multiple Yammer BU groups into a Sector feed. Same goes down one level ie. rolling up all the Yammer groups within a particular BU into a BU feed.

What about MS Teams...a Team may be set up for a big project, and could have 10 channels, each dealing with a different part of the project. What's missing is an aggregated feed of all the channels within that team ie. a team feed

Copper Contributor

I am not understanding the fuss about all of this.

 

People, if you know Sharepoint you can build this functionality now whatever version you have, you don't need to wait for this new (old/exisiting functionality)

 

Go learn about (or do if you know how):

 

  • Create a site collection
  • Create a sub site for your "news" and your required team sites for events, documents etc
  • Create Content Types/Page layouts (create one or many for a "news" site articles)
  • Meta Data for tagging news articles for grouping etc
  • On your site collection home page
    • Create a page layout to replicate the above layout 
    • Create Search Queries (or custom webparts using rest api but search will do this job)
      • Create display templates to make the search queries look good
      • Create some html/css to make it look good!

 

Simple!

 

Iron Contributor
@Craig McDermot - whilst some of what you say is true, if you think a Sub site has anything like the power and flexibility of an MS Team, I think you may not have had enough experience of newer O365/SharePoint functionality. Additionally your expectation that every SharePoint user should be able to do what you lay out above is massively unrealistic. If you work in a small company maybe, but if you have hundreds of thousands of employees running thousands of sharepoint sites, this functionality is beyond 99% of them. You are also ignoring the fact that the Modern UI is making its way into more and more of SharePoint because MS want more people to be able to do semi advanced stuff easily. So 1 person being able to advanced stuff is not as effective as 9 people being able to do semi advanced stuff
Brass Contributor

@Mark MooreI was about to reply with almost exactly what you said, I fully expect the people replying here are capable of what @Craig McDermott suggested but the point of it is 1. The new way will be far quicker 2. It's accesible to users 3. It empowers users further so we can concentrate on doing the more complex things instead of constantly worrying about the structure of our site collections.

Copper Contributor

@Mark Moore Hi Mark, why you focusing on subsites? This is a site collection that has been planned properly with subsites, content roles up and some time spent on making it look good, you do know the "new" team sites are just a team site right? I am complaining about the fuss because many developers spotted MS did a bad job with the UI and ease of SharePoint for many years have been building SharePoint sites like this for up to a decade.

I am certainly not saying users should be building the items i listed in my original post, that is the job of the developers, to make the uploading of content much easier. It's crazy to think a user would understand these things!

..................

Copper Contributor

@Sebastian Burrell If you are starting with a greenfield site, yes MS have done a great job of making this old functionality easier to understand, but my gripe as you know is this can be achieved without waiting for "new" functionality.  Also, this doesn't magically help you if you've already got a farm with thousands of users and terabytes of content.

Iron Contributor

@Craig McDermott- Yes I am well aware a MS team is an part of an Office Group which in turn includes a SharePoint group. I stopped using Sub sites a while ago and moved to MS teams, it is far more flexible. A site collection is a far more rigid structure and not as able to flex when teams shift. Thanks for the offer of the setup working, but I have exampes of my own I could show this set up working (but only at my own local level, not company wide) I am well aware of site collection design, having worked as a site admin/designer for many SharePoint versions. I think the problem with our conversation is that we are talking different scales. I work for one of the largest global IT services company in the world, servicing hundreds of different sectors, thousands of customers, a site collection for people to "create news articles" is not going to cut it, hundreds of site collections in the manner you describe would not achieve the requirements of functionally, scale and speed of deployment. Neither is it acceptable to make the business wait to provision simply functionality because we need power users to do it

Copper Contributor

@Mark Moore I’m still baffled you think Teams is not a SharePoint site and has better scalability ..............

This is going off topic and down a road im not going to take. All the best resolving your issues with the new SharePoint hubs functionality.

Iron Contributor

@Craig McDermot - I deleted my last post because as you already said, was off topic. MS Teams is NOT a sharepoint site, its a component of Office groups, of which another component is a connected SharePoint group, but a sharepoint group is NOT the same as a full blown team collaboration site

 

Microsfts use of the word "Team" in multipe contexts doesn't help discussions either

Copper Contributor

@Mark Moore open one of your teams with "open in sharepoint" you will notice it's a Sharepoint site collection apart from the conversations.

My original post was about this article "Sharepoint hub sites" (clues in the title) and i wanted to point out to people that asked this week "when can we have this amazing functionality of a site that aggregates data from my sites"..........and my reply is they can have it now, but you disagree. 

Iron Contributor
@Craig McDermot - we are going nowhere with this. I already told you I know there is a SharePoint site underneath, but depending on what your are talking about ie. If its a SharePoint Group, created by way of creating a Microsoft team, then it is NOT a full Collaboration site as some features are disabled. I came to this post because I read (maybe mistakenly) that the Microsft Hub will allow the aggregation of multiple sites INCLUDING Office Group sites(eg MS teams sites) So, if I tell 10,000 of our companies site owners they can have the functionality you described this week, could you please give me an estimate of completion time for this? A week? And if they need some minor tweaks, can they keep coming back to you? You keep missing my references to scale and speed of deployment of functionality. Happy to continue in PM if desired
Microsoft

Hi @Ivan Unger,

 

Glad you like the concept, and can adapt to the name, which feels right as a new component for your intranet that can bring together many communicaiton sites and team sites. It's common for people to call their sphere of activity at whatever level a XYZ Hub, XYZ Central, XYC Web - in fact our customer Shire calls their main company portal, "The Hub." Great minds, and we aim to be descriptive, where visually in the UI you can call it (at whatever leve) whatever you like ;).

 

Tackling your question:

- A hub site can be either like a team site or a communication site at its roots, and on top of that, it adds the common nav, cross-site search, consistnet theme, plus news and activity roll up (only roll up content a this time). We think it'll be most common to have a hub site be a communication site, but if you did use more of a team site approach, know that the hub site would get a new Office 365 group, which could be handy infomrational architrecture if planned for all associiated sites to follow that same persmisisons model from top down.

- "make this site a hub" checkbox was in an early build, and with the focus of hub sites being admin created, we do not think that will be in the final design.

- And Cc'ing @Michael Lorentz for this one: a hub site cannot be joined to another hub site (I'll reply with a longer answer to that one beyond the "No" in this bulleted list).

 

Thx,

Mark

Microsoft

Hi @Sebastian Burrell,

 

You're ahead of the curve, and this is one item we wanted to show for sure, and knowing that it was further out than other items, yet important to provide visibility for better planning as best we can articulate. We'll refine the when when we can, and gald it tipped a blip on your radar and got your noodle spinning. 

 

You won't be able to join one hub site under another, which does not preclude how you leverage the full set of building blocks SharePoint will offer: hub sites, communication sites, team sites, SharePoint home in Office 365, SharePoint mobile apps, custom portal, partner solutions and the Microsoft Graph. We're working on richer guidance to help approach your desired future state, and we know this is ever-changing and dynamic.

 

Thx,

Mark

Microsoft

Hi @Mark Moore,

 

What's all the hub hub, Bub? Maybe should've copyrighted, and I say great minds SharePoint alike! The details will come certainly as we release the capability and you can devil through them on Support.com - though best expericen will be to fire one up, join a few sites and put it in your toolkit of useful tools I'm certain you'll use :-).

 

And you are correct, a team site or communication site can be joined to only one hub site, for the reason you suggest - it'll inherit the nav, theme, search scope and contribute back up the chain with news and activity rollup. That being said, the nav element does not require to only be populated with joined sites. You can have 100s of joined sites, of which only a handful may be showing for your desired outcome. And similarly, you can have nav elements at the hub site level that link to whatever you want them to (unjoined sites, documents, external sites/videos, etc.); aka, reference what you need. And a joined site can be joined and un'joined in seconds.

 

Thx for the eyeballs and healthy discussion,

Mark

Microsoft

Hi @Joshua Zelvy,

 

Absolutely, you can connect a SharePoint team site that is connected to an Office 365 group. A site can only be joined to one hub site, and certainly a hub site can have numerous team sites and/or communication sites joined under it - the value of bringing together the right resources as disticntly related collections of sites.

 

Hope that helps,

Mark

Microsoft

Hi @Michael Lorentz w/Cc @Ivan Unger,

 

A hub site cannot be joined under another hub site.

 

I thought to take a moment and give perspective on the various levels and components Microsoft offers via SharePoint to help build out your full intranet. I do get the value of nesting a nested nest, and also beleive from an user perspective that there is not one site that ever rules them all - it's the site that is needed now, and even further it's the content in the site that may surface elsewhere at this right time in the right (often virtual) place.

 

With SharePoint hub sites we feel we're introducing an important mechanism to help organize and promote related ideas and people as one, at least until that one becomes three, or twenty, or several humdred - and then you have several hub sites - to the point of your question. And every company will have varying informational architecture needs - and these will change as the business changes.

 

Here's a quick glance at the various components we offer alongside hub sites - of which I feel the collective give you targeted outreach and collab, personalized aggreagation of sites/people/content and certainly scale felxibility to build what you need beyond out of the box:

- Communication sites

- Team sites

- The SharePoint home in Office 365

- SharePoint mobile apps

- Custom and partner solution sites

- Microsoft Graph (how we use it and the available API to build your own relevant, intelligent experiecnes right into your sites, into your intranet).

 

Thx,

Mark

Microsoft

Hi @Scott Smith,

 

SharePoint hub sites will be available first in Office 365. And like all SharePoint Online components, it will be considered for on-premises at a future date. We've not yet shared details about the next major version, SharePoint Server 2019 (announced at Ignite 2017, beta mid 2018, released late 2018), and cannot comment on what feature(s) may or may not be a part of that release or future updates.

 

Thx,

Mark

Microsoft

Hi @John Tropea,

 

We also announced a new Yammer web part (more here). The aggreation of the various group feeds is not solved, and it would be easy to create a section of your hub sites home, or within a news article, or on a page within a communicaiton site (the tech is the same throughout). I could envision creating a three-column layout, and using the Yammer web part three time, each instance showcasing a different group feed - side by side in the context you set at the site or page/article level.

 

Microsoft Teams introduces a new element for sure, and we've first decided to tackle the push of SharePoint content into a Teams channel/discussion. Now that their API is ready, we'll begin to further plan future integration offerings between the two. Lots of great feedback flowing in, with early #likes on how SharePoint files, pages and news flow into the chat-based workspace.

 

Thanks,

Mark

Iron Contributor

Thx Mark

 

Just to clarify, at the moment can you have multiple Yammer webparts on a SharePoint page, each webpart being a different group feed??

 

In the future if there was an aggregated Yammer feed from multiple groups, it would certainly save space, and all you would need to do is have the further option of filtering the aggregated feed by group

 

Bronze Contributor

 Hi @Mark Kashman, thanks for taking the time to respond to our questions. Am I correct to assume, that we will be able to retroactively set an existing SharePoint Site as a "hub site". Meaning, I won't have to create a new Hub site, but can activate my existing communication site to be a hub site?

Copper Contributor

@Mark Moore Hello again Mark, let’s try and keep this positive.

I came to this article because people were asking when can we have this functionality (for SharePoint online or on prem). I posted that people can have this now as all this "new" functionality is in fact available to them now and has been for many years.

** It’s a site collection that aggregates data from sub sites based on content type **

You disagreed about my SharePoint online knowledge, but I’ll leave that now as it went way off track :)

Now on to your questions about giving your 10,000 site admins this functionality. It’s fairly simple as stated in my original post, as you already have the site collections look in to (or speak with a developer within your team) about content types, site templates, search queries (or rest api) and how to package this for easy deployment so you can make it available to your site admins, no matter the size of your organization you can make this available to everyone in your business in a relatively short space of time, depending on the speed of your developers ;)

I will congraulate MS they have done a great job with this functionality making this easier to understand for companies that don't have developers or experts in house.

Microsoft

Hi @Ivan Unger - we are looking at how we can enable admins to be able to create new hub sites, and uplevel an existing site with the additioinal 'hub' capabilities. Create new is a for sure item, as that is what we showed at Ignite, and the latter is one the team would like to provide as it's common feedback so far that people have said, "I already have the site that i want to be the hub." And with good reason.

 

We will share more as the plans and code get backed beyond the early preview of Ignite.

 

Thx,

Mark

Bronze Contributor
Thanks. I really hope activating existing sites to be hub sites will be released with the preview.  If not, I think you could be delaying a few rollouts here :p Right now I've waited a little bit on communication sites, to get a better grasp on the rollup/organization wide features that are on the roadmap. I wanted to get started on deploying multiple communication sites and actively replace our current intranet solution. Not being able to set existing sites as hub sites, would mean either to create all destined hub sites all over again (effectively taking away the vanity URL and all the additional work) or wait another 6 months (which would be sad).
Copper Contributor

I am still catching up on these hub sites...

 

When we design intranets for clients, we do have news/events, but there is a lot more static content on the page, such as custom web parts for the user to create their own shortcuts, employee spotlight, etc.

 

A few questions:

  1. Can the hub site template be modified to have static content web parts?
  2. Can the hub site have its own news artcles (from itself) also aggregating subsites news up to it as well?
  3. How techncially do these hub sites work?
    1. How are the content search web parts configured? Is content scoped to the associated sites and displayed using nice display templates?
    2. How is navigation kept consitant? Managed Navigation?
    3. How are logos synced? Just one image linked to all the sub sites using a feature on deployment?
    4. How are custom themes picked? Does the parent apply the same theme to children?
    5. Is there really any special magic here other than basic configuration that can be done by a user easily each time creating a new site (yea I know its a pain so glad this is being solved using hub sites)?

Just hoping to learn a bit more about these puppies. Or if anyone has a YouTube link to an Ignite video that gets down into the details, send it my way!

 

Thanks

 

Eric

Brass Contributor

Will these hubs have support multiple languages?

e.g. a multilingual hub site with two communication sites for different languages

Copper Contributor

Forgive my ignorance, am I right in thinking that only 'SharePoint Team sites' will hook up to a hub, I'm assuming that this functionality won't be available to 'Microsoft Teams' SharePoint sites?

Iron Contributor
@Vanessa Nattrass - I don't think its your ignorance :) Microsoft's use of the words "Teams" and "groups" has been overused in to many different contexts these last few years. I spend far to much time explaining to my users the difference between aspects of these words
Copper Contributor

Thanks Mark :)

I've managed to get my head around "Groups" and "Teams", at least I think so!  Though I do wish when MS announce new features that they were slightly clearer as to what they're referring to.

In this case I'm going with the assumption that only 'SharePoint Teams' and Communication Sites will hook up to the new Hub sites. :)

Hey Mark it's a very good news and i like it ! My customer are enjoy because I work with he on a big innovative Intranet and Hub is the next step of intranet 3.0

Brass Contributor

I am super pleased to see this coming.  For me it provides a solution to hand stitching our intranet together via links to what feels like disparate resources...even when all are sharepoint....some behind the firewall, some in O365, some classic...some modern.  So much change to address while we are still building the intranet at the same time.  Still, this is fantastic, and will give us direction towards Intranet 3.0 now.   What I want to see now is the ability to drag and drop sites around.  :)

 

Awesome stuff.


Scott

Deleted
Not applicable

1. Will it be possible to connect both 0365 SharePoint Online sites and on prem SharePoint 2016 sites to a single O365 SharePoint Online hub site?
2. Can SharePoint Online sites from more than one tenant (internal and external for example) be connected to the same hub site? What about sites from older SharePoint sites such as on prem-2010 or 2013?

 

 

Copper Contributor

I love this idea! but the love of all that is SharePointastic, bring it to on premise, where we REALLY REALLY REALLY need to use this!

Another thing you could do, is to allow ONPREM sites to join a Hub site in the cloud.

 

This stuff is soo cool. But don't forget about us on prem minions!

nando

Copper Contributor
I had a client ask me today what I thought was a good question: Can one use the Hub efficiently and effectively to show P3 in an automatic structure? By that I mean, can one use Hub to have a Portfolio view (Hub) aggregate info from sub-sites (programs) that in turn aggregate from Project sub-sites? It was an interesting concept and one that I would find valuable. Please let me know if this is not clear enough, as I am trying to wrap my head around it as I type...
Copper Contributor

From the article:

"After a hub site is created, site owners can associate existing team sites and communication sites with the hub site"

As a hub site owner, can I approve / reject these associations?

Copper Contributor

Hi Mark,

   When you mentioned team sites and communication sites able to connect to hub sites, can i clarify on team sites. Is team sites refer to office365 team site template?   

I have old team sites setup on old team site template, is this still possible to connect to hub site? To connect to hub site, does the Team sites (new) need to be on it's own site collection? Does sub-sites able to connect to hub sites?

 

Thanks.

SB

Microsoft

@Andy Legg an approval process for hub owners to approve/reject sites from associating to a hub site is definitely something we are targeting. 

Iron Contributor

I may have missed this, but can classic team sites be connected to hub sites, or is it only for modern team sites and communication sites? Thanks! We are trying to determine what we need to do to prepare for hub sites. We currently have all classic SharePoint team sites, and many site collections that have plenty of subsites. I'm trying to decide if all of that will need to be converted at some point to single site collections using the new modern team site template in order to be connected to hubs.

Microsoft

Hi @Katrin Weixel@See Bee Lim - it is possible to connect an existing (classic) team site to a hub site without associating it to a new Office 365 group - the caveat being that you need to be using a modern home page on the classic team site so that the modern Site information pane shows, where it is then possible to select the desired hub site you have permissions to join. On any classic team site, it's possible to create a modern page, place the desired web parts in the desired layouts per section(s), and then from the Pages library (Site contents > Pages document library), you simply select your new modern page and "make it the home page."

 

And @See Bee Lim - no, you cannot join a subsite directly, you join the whole site collection. If need be, you can migrate content from a subsite into it's own new site collection if you need it to be a unique site joined to a hub site. However, if you have subsites, they will remain under the site collection as is when the site collection itself is joined to a hub site (we don't change hierarchy within the site collection).

Microsoft

@Chris Pettigrew - on day one, hub sites will have the ability to rollup News, site activities and events - plus the benefit of scoped search where a joined site's content is included within the default search scope from the hub site home page. What you're looking for is a fairly straight forward use of the Graph API and a custom web part using #SPFx to provide UI to the results the API call results returns; similar to programming a Content by Search web part.

Microsoft

@Michael Lorentz - There won't be a way for on-prem sites to join a hub site for a bit. With SSO established, you can certainly add the URL to an on-prem site manually to the hub site top nav, but it won't be joined (so no news/activity/events roll up, no inheritance of theme, no cross-site nav when you land on on-prem site if you click from the hub site...). And similar for cross-tenant approach - the hub site picker is tenant scoped for now, so you wouldn't see a list of hub site from tenant A as a choice top join from tenant B.

+1, @Melissa Torres to keep me honest and to read feedback. :)

Microsoft

Hi @Vanessa Nattrass - the team site is the same - so yes, the site you refer to as the one for/from MS Teams, is simply the group's team site. And it of course can be joined to a hub site. :)

Microsoft

@Jeroen Lammens - the team is reviewing how we support multi-lingual scenarios for modern communication and hub sites. We don't have anything further to share today, but to share that it's a known ask and one we'd like to address in 2018 - it's top of mind.

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