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

at the Ignite conference it was defintly 100% clear you do not want to create subsites anymore. So this is your first answer. 

 

the Hub is still in development but i think this will definitely be the way to go with SharePoint. 

 

A example why you should choose sitecollections and the instead of subsites is that when you need to move a site to a different department or other sitecollection. this is not possible without migrating if you use a subsite.

Hmm. Okay.  Good to know that was the message given.  I don't know that I entirely agree with that approach.

 

Hubs will not be able to be linked to other hubs, so that means only one level of categorization of a site.  And while I do understand the problem of moving a site between departments requiring export/import, it is not a scenario I've run into so frequently that subsites should be ruled out categorically.

 

i would say that from a performance viewpoint, resolving sub-sites has always been an overhead as it reduces the amount of work that can be delegated to SQL by the need to translate internal sharepoint only meta-structures. Now that the old limitations around site collections and database sizes have gone, it makes sense to evolve the granularity and use site collections as the atomic site so that performance can be accelerated. it is only because we have got in the habit of subsites that we are nervous about moving away from them. The advantages they gave in inheritance are much outweighed by the problems of broken inheritance. The inability to separate them in SQL can become a problem as a site grows and then forces a restructuring.

For small segregations then List/ Library structures can be used instead of subsites to partition data physically for security purposes.

The HUBS architecture looks like a more formalised evolution of cross-site publishing which delivers a very robust and flexible system where I have used it before. excellent pattern that really leverages search.

 

perhaps those with a love for subsites could bullet point their advantages to see if we can suggest how that functionality would be designed into a site collection approach.

I'd rather not have to sacrifice information architecture and usability for the sake of performance, especially in an Intranet as its main function is to provide information. So my concern is more whether we are losing an aspect of information architecture that can be beneficial for certain types of users, those that prefer browsing to searching.

 

At least one scenario we use is a site collection of clients.  Each client is a subsite which in turn has subsites for those projects.  We could have a hub that surfaced the site collections of clients, but then what about the projects and searching across all of that structure?

 

I'm glad you qualified the multiple List/Library approach for small segregations.  I've seen the opposite, and the job of trying to split that information apart into separate sites is quite a bit more difficult than moving a subsite into its own site collection.

 

But that said, we haven't had a lot of people "with a love of subsites" chiming in :-).  And maybe I just need to get my head to think a different way.

 

As you probably have seen there will be 2 navigation bars one for the the hub and it linked sites and one on top which lets you navigate to other hub sites. As it is not Live at this moment i do not have exact specs.

 

Yes, I did see that.  But I do know that in the current Hub specs (or in the talk), they said you cannot make a hub part of another hub.  Certainly, you can link to another hub, but searching and rolling up across two hubs might not work.

 

I can see making a site directory with a list and Site Designs that use a flow to post to the list which could provide category and sub-category information for sites in the list.  But I've often longed to be able to assign metadata to sites using the UI (rather than programmatically using the property bag)  If we could do that, we could more easily provide some kind of automatic navigation between site collections based on categories.

Mary,

 

We currently have the same information architecture on premises. One site collection per client (> 150,000) and one subsite per project (2-50 per client). We could use a hub per client but then we loose the «all clients» scope.

 

If we stay with the subsites, it prevent us from using Teams and Planner for the projects.

 

We have to make on decision on our 2.0 architecture for the cloud and I think we will have to leave the subsites strategy. 

A concern raised by a coworker is that all modern team sites are associated with a different Office 365 Group.  And you can't add a group to another group.  So maintenance of security across all those groups could be an issue.   Will it be possible at some point to associate multiple modern team sites with one group?

Glad we have the migration tool. I think that will come in handy with all my subsites.

I agree. I don't really understand how this will work for us. We are a small company with quite a lot of projects and the current modern experience doesn't allow us to organise sites in an easy way. We currently have 9 service areas with programmes and projects underneath those. Many projects relate to each other so have a natural hierarchy and while a flat structure is fine for quick access via the hub, it is not very useful for finding old projects that we regularly need to refer to. We also don't want to spend thousands of pounds contracting consultants to write some bespoke pages for us, especially when there is such a transition between classic and modern.

 

Does anyone have any links to videos/pages that explain how a company *should* structure their site collections to create a coherent structure in line with our operational needs? Most of the videos i've seen just demo individual site/group creation.

One strong argument for the classic sub-site Information Architecture is that important Web Designer Galleries -- the Web Parts gallery, the List templates gallery and the Style Library -- all live in the Site Collection, not in the sub-sites. We maintain important assets in these galleries and in the Style Library: in one place, where a change automatically applies to all the subsites within that site collection.

 

In a new Information Architecture where all sites are site collections -- and we have 1000s of these site collections -- where do we deploy a common, custom JavaScript that we would traditionally keep in the Style Library? Same question for custom list templates, web parts, themes, solutions and composed looks?

I totally agree with your concerns.

  1. Making such a change in the architecture would be really huge for us with hundreds of subsites created
  2. What about the re-usability of
    1. security groups within a site collection
    2. Site columns
    3. Site content types
  3. The security management will become a nightmare as we cannot add a group (or security group or distribution list) to a group
  4. Hubs don't nest!!!!

All of this goes away to ashes with the site collection/o365 group approach.

It would have been simple to allow an office 365 group to be linked to an existing subsite wouldn't it?

 

I don't see how this could be an enhancement...

 

This was a concern for us, but the use of groups functionality outweighed the reusing of security groups, which after looking at our users, turns out was not done much.

I would be interested to know how Hubs manage permissions, it at all.

Related to this - if I wish to make a custom list accessible to a number of sub-sites then it must live in the root site of the site collection. I don't see how I can provide this functionality if I adopt the "new" flat infrastructure where subsites are not used

I know that in our on-prem 2010 environment, subsites were over-used and often created real tangles of permissions and navigation, so we're trying to get people on board with a flatter structure. However, we have a number of cases where that really wouldn't work or make sense. For example, we have a department that handles "Student Conduct Hearings". Each "case" they handle has a unique set of users (viewers) and needs its own site provisioned using a customized site template (with IRM enabled on the doc library). I'm sure we could create our own site collection template, but we want the end users ("owners" of the site) to be able to provision those case sites without our intervention (and we have self-service site creation disabled).

 

For this purpose, the classic layout of the subsites isn't really a problem, but it's visually jarring to go from a modern site to a classic one. 

Yes, that's what I'm finding as well.  I try to use as flat a structure as possible, but there are certain types of business processes I want to support in SharePoint Online that just work better with a subsite structure in order to be able organize the content and then also bubble up content from all the sites.  Hub sites will help as well Site Designs (the ability to "templatize" modern sites), but not in all cases.

Hello,

I have a classic site with 2000 subsites in it. If i convert it to a Hub site and link all subsites to the hub site; is it possible to do?

 

 

Vinita, no. Modern team sites and modern communication sites link to hub sites. I have not heard any simple answer to what do you do with thousands of classic sub-sites.

Thanks Martin for your quick response.

If I change this main site from classic to Modern experience can then it be converted to a hub site?