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Sharepont 2013 to Shareoint online. Choice of architecture

Copper Contributor

We have a customer on Sharepoint 2013 with about 200 subsites in one site collection. He will like to move to sharepoint online (new template) (Hub architecture). 

Benefits he has today:

• Easy to create subsites based on his own templates
• Easy to mange access with sharepoint groups. 

If no big disadvantages will he like to have it as he has it today. Will it be a big mistake to crate one site collection in sharepoint online on a teamsite (no office 365 group) and defined it as a hub site and keep all the subsites as he has it today? If so, what will be the main disadvantages?

2 Replies
best response confirmed by Beau Cameron (MVP)
Solution
Why defining the site as Hub Site if you are going to keep the subsites? I don't see a problem on moving to a pure Hub Sites + Flat Architecture your customer architecture...you will also able to advice/help them on defining a process to craete new sites joined to the Hub. This is what we have done for a customer with an architecture with more than 800 sites in a site collection:
- We created a Hub Site
- We migrated each subsite to site joined to the Hub
- We created a Site creation Wizard in SPFx to create sites joined to the hub based on a common PnP template

@Juan Carlos González Martín 

 

Our customer use a SP 2013 team site today with left and top navigation. He will like to keep this, and only way I have found to get top menu down to subsites is to use the hub menu. Many skilled Sharepoint consultets recommend flat architecture, move subsites to site collections, but miss good arguments for doing this in this case.

 

Only found this:

"However, subsites don't give any room for flexibility and change. Since subsites are a physical construct reflected in the URL for content, if you reorganize your business relationships, you will break all the intranet relationships in your content. Subsites can also create challenges when it comes to governance because many features (including policy features like retention and classification) in SharePoint apply to all sites within the site collection, whether you want them to or not. This means that you must frequently enable a feature for the entire site collection, even if it's only applicable to one subsite.

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/planning-hub-sites#additional-important-considerations

 

But this flexibility is not important for our customer.  More arguments for flat architecture are welcomed. 

 

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by Beau Cameron (MVP)
Solution
Why defining the site as Hub Site if you are going to keep the subsites? I don't see a problem on moving to a pure Hub Sites + Flat Architecture your customer architecture...you will also able to advice/help them on defining a process to craete new sites joined to the Hub. This is what we have done for a customer with an architecture with more than 800 sites in a site collection:
- We created a Hub Site
- We migrated each subsite to site joined to the Hub
- We created a Site creation Wizard in SPFx to create sites joined to the hub based on a common PnP template

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