Modern subsites?

Iron Contributor

All flavors of "Modern sites" that are created now are Site collections by definition with the top level site providing the "Modern" UI experience.  I'm wondering what the future is for subsites in the "modern" experience? I know you can create a classic subsite and add modern pages to it, but that's not quite the same thing.  And you don't get some of the modern features.  E.g. you can't apply the modern themes to these sites from the Settings gear.

 

I know a lot of organizations have made mistakes in trying to put all content in a single site collection, but I'm also wondering if having all sites in single-site site collections makes sense? Are Hubs enough to manage those?  And what do we do with all the classic sites that are organized into subsite hierarchies?

 

Does anyone know what the future is for the modern experience and subsites beyond Hubs?

 

29 Replies

I do not think you can change an existing classic site into a Hub site. Hub sites are 100% understood yet (are not yet released to all O365) but studying the thread in the blog by @Mark Kashman (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/SharePoint-hub-sites-new-in-Office-365/ba-p/1...) I found Mark say, "A hub site can be either like a team site or a communication site at its roots" which leads me to suspect you have to start with a modern site and then can make it into a Hub site. For sure the hub must be a site collection as modern team sites and modern communication sites are site collections.

That is true i guess hope we will see this rolled out soon as more and more of my clients are asking for it.

I am concerned about what happens to existing structure in this scenario. I understand that splitting things out into site collections can be better in some instances, but what about where you have different solutions or sub departments and you want a separate group associated with it for each? Or the case where you have regional sites and then departments per site that need to re-use content from the regional site collection root (site columns, content types, etc.) Are we expected to duplicate all those columns across the site collections that need them?? To rule the possibility of O365 Group Enabled subsites out completely is going to hamper existing tenants switching over to the modern experience in a major way.

Current, the new Hub Sites, do not provide any ability to deploy Content Types and/or site columns

If you need to control these, the current best approach is to the PnP PowerShell cmdlets to provision new sites with the specific items you desire

 

@Sean Squiresfrom Microsoft has stated that they are working on improving the functionality in the Content Type Hub, what this means and when it will happen remain to be seen. 

 

I don't see group-enables subsites coming any time soon because that would make a very complicated engineering problem even worse.

 

How do we share lists across site collections, the kind that drive lookup column values? This is a major reason why ppl use subsites...Not going to use managed metadata for dynamic content like contracts, purchase orders, work packages, etc...

I am having the exact same issue. I am in the process of trying to plan for migration and want to migrate from on premise classic to cloud modern. I think mixed use will just bring so much confusion to my user base. I have a definite need to have shared lookup columns also (ie Customer lookup etc). It is crazy to have to maintain multiple lookup lists what a mess. I use AD groups for security so I don't need O365 groups for security, however I do use SharePoint groups only for SharePoint Designer workflows and sometimes for field level security on custom forms using client-side JS. I am hoping that I will be able to use my AD groups for workflows when I rewrite workflows using Flow. I have no idea whether I can use the AD groups for custom forms using either PowerApps or SharePoint Framework custom forms.

So I believe it's currently for First Release tenants only, but it will be possible to create Modern Team Sites as subsites without groups associated with them in the near future:

2018-08-30 15_55_42-New SharePoint Site.png

Yes, I had heard that rumor :)

This option showed up in our Dev tenant a few weeks ago. Has not appeared in production tenant yet.

Same here, too. Eager to find out, what those will do to the information flow with news and so on.