One Hub or multiple Hubs

Brass Contributor

We have a relatively large organization (over 1000 employees) and about a dozen departments, each with several teams in them, serving the administrative side of our organization. We're looking at two potential models for hubs and trying to evaluate which makes sense.

  1. A single "Intranet" hub with every department and team connected to it. We'd then use the hub navigation to point to each non-hub department. We'd manually select new sources from teams related to a department to highlight in the non-hub department sites.
  2. Hub sites for each department that rolls up content from their sub-teams. We'd then have a main "intranet" home (hub or not) that we'd link in the branded Office 365 bar. In the news web part on that main site, we'd manually select all of the sites that should be syndicated up to this organizational home.

I'm not sure which fits with the hub model that Microsoft is building out. If you could have hubs above hubs, then it is obvious that each department would be a hub. Without nested hubs, then I'm not sure what to do. Can you syndicate news and documents from a hub to another site (that would include content from the child sites)? Anyone else thinking through this all right now? 

12 Replies

We are in the same predicament. 

We've also thought that having hubs on hubs would work best for us.

My opinion is swaying more to Option 2.

As a general comment you *may* wish to defer any major design decisions until after the SharePoint Conference in May. If not option 2 seems a more flexible choice. Speaking personally I cannot see why a ‘hub of hubs’ approach is not technically feasible. I’m still in favour of an enterprise landing page myself to create a single entry point.
We've been deferring for some time. We deferred until communications site. Then until hubs. We just need to move forward now. I'm hoping that we get a hub of hubs. That could work with either option 1 or 2 if it comes later. Right now I'm leaning toward option 2.
Fair point @Stewart Foss I’ve been in similar positions myself. If you have access to a Microsoft representative for your organisation I wonder if they would be able to share anything to help you under an NDA. Just a thought.
@Mark Kashman any thoughts from you or others from the Microsoft crew?

I would recommend multiple hubs and in terms of navigation use a global navigation application customizer that is deployed across each site collection. Once thing I am not clear on is if an application customizer is deployed to a hub site if it pushes out to all attached site collections associated with it. 

Multiples hubs has a few other benefits, in my opinion, not listed yet:

  • While SharePoint handles security gracefully, some business users might be wary of having "one hub for everything"
  • Security can actually be managed a little better with multiple hubs depending on what you are trying to accomplish.
  • Searching for what you need gets a little more granular and specific with multiple hubs.  And as others have been alluding to, Microsoft is working hard on search in general.
  • I don't have any facts on this, but the performance of multiple hubs may be better than having everything flowing into a single hub.

The #2 option is more inline with how the product feature is designed. And I do feel gives the best foot forward for each department to get the most of what they need from a day-to-day pov.

 

Each department will retain more freedom in their own space, with all the benefits hub sites offer for cross-site nav, news and such.

It would be feasible to create a distinct hub site or custom portal to help the whole company find each department - if this is a goal. But this is merely manually configuring the nav to point to each department hub as you cannot associate one hub under another. However, the cross-site nav element can be programmed with anything, so it may help with organizing - but to be clear, only the department hub sites would get the value of roll up and scoped search - and each department remain a little more autonomous.

Creating a simple custom portal (front door) to all is not uncommon, and an area of great interest to our customers, our partners in this space, and Microsoft. 

And one small note, the hub sites planning guide is in final mile review, and I'll update the launch blog and make a little tweet noise about it from @SharePoint.   

 

Cheers,

Mark

Thanks for getting involved Mark, Appreciated!


@Mark Kashman wrote:

 

Creating a simple custom portal (front door) to all is not uncommon, and an area of great interest to our customers, our partners in this space, and Microsoft. 

 

 


Hi Mark,

So in the context of a small organisation (350 people) wanting to have an Intranet portal for the entire organisation , that perhaps rolls up content from division sites (and/or team and project sites), best practice may be to create a custom portal using a communication site (or is a publishing site recommended here?) and allow the site owners to use Hero and news web parts to manually link to articles across multiple sites (rather than to have automatic roll up of content from sub-hub sites that the site owners of the hub site have limited control of).

Hub sites could be created for each division (or functional area) within the organisation. teams within the division/functional area would each have their own team (or team site) which could be connected to the appropriate divisional hub site. the advantage here being that if an organisation changes e.g. a new division is created and a team is moved to the new division, it is now very easy to associate the existing team site with the new hub site for the division.

thanks,

colm

@Stewart Foss

What model did you go with and how is it working?

I am also curious what the decision was and how things are going with the approach you've taken. Thank you!