What are your lessons learned from organizing intranet with hubs, sites and pages

Brass Contributor

Hi.

 

We're an educational institution, and like others we have multiple faculties, departments, projects, and so forth. As we'll be building our new intranet on Sharepoint Online, I'm reading up on other Sharepoint users's dos and don'ts. 

 

I've found a few good resources on how to best organize an Intranet based on Sharepoint Online: 

 

 

There's some good advice in those discussions, but as these discussions are mostly based on what the participants were planning to do, I was wondering if anyone here have actually implemented Sharepoint Online as their intranet and would share some insight on lessons learned from things such as...

  • organizing contents in hubs, sites and pages
  • setting up access control for each of these

 

5 Replies

Hi @kenneho,

 

I'm in higher-ed and recently did a webinar with Microsoft on our SharePoint deployment and our lessons learned.

 

You can watch on demand here: https://info.microsoft.com/CA-WWEDU-WBNR-FY20-08Aug-15-brockuniversityourjourneytothecloudusingshare...

 

The slide deck can be found here: https://normyoung.ca/2019/08/15/sharepoint-webinar/

 

I hope this helps.

 

Norm

Hi @Norman Young,

 

How did you get your buttons to look so clean? Is it a custom spx webpart?

clipboard_image_0.png

 

I can't seem to have much luck with the built in quick links webpart, I get a grey square around everything when I use a custom icon...

clipboard_image_1.png

Hi @Rhys Williams,

 

Out of the box "Quick links" with custom images. 

 

Norm

 

 

Thank you so much, @Norman Young - there's a lot of excellent information in that presentation. 

 

After watching the presentation I still have a few questions, so if you have the time to briefly comment on one or more of those I'd greatly appreciate it: 

  1. Regarding faculties and departments:
    1. Did you create a site for all faculties, and all departments in those faculties? 
    2. Which type of sites did you create up front, and which did you leave it up to the employees to create for themselves? 
    3. Are your faculty- and departments sites hub sites?
  2. How did you decide if something should be put on a page within a site, or if it should have it's own site?
  3. How did you decide on which sites should be hubs and which should not?  
  4. I see that you allow employees to create sites on demand. Do you automatically associate these sites with a hub or at least create a link to the site from somewhere? 

 

If you by any chance happen to have an (extract of a) document describing how your sites are organized and would be willing to share that would be great - it don't need to be complete, but just enough to get a general idea of which type of sites you have and how they're connected. 

 

Hi @kenneho,

 

I'm glad the presentation was of value. Feedback listed below.

 

  1. Regarding faculties and departments:
    1. Did you create a site for all faculties, and all departments in those faculties? 
      Communication sites for all Faculties. Academic departments got one if requested. All major administrative departments (i.e. Finance, HR, IT etc.) have communication sites with lots of employee resources and content.

    2. Which type of sites did you create up front, and which did you leave it up to the employees to create for themselves? 
      Communication sites for faculty and major administrative departments were created up front as part of a large portal project. Department and campaign sites are requested by employees.
    3. Are your faculty- and departments sites hub sites?
      Our current portal is in the root site collection with sub-sites. We are moving to a flat architecture that will utilize a single HUB as the portal landing site.

      We use HUB's for our team sites were it makes sense. I.e. IT has 6 functional teams with separate sites that are tied together via the HUB. It simplifies navigation for the team.

  2. How did you decide if something should be put on a page within a site, or if it should have it's own site?
    Communicating static information is done via a page (i.e. instructions on following a process).

    Collaborating on files is done document libraries. We let the document(s) sensitivity drive security. If content is "safe" for viewing by the entire team, store it in the site. If it is not "safe" find a secure location for it (i.e. separate site, document library with unique permissions etc).

    Check out this SP Usage Doc for more information: https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-usage-docs/blob/master/docs/basics/library-scenarios.md

  3. How did you decide on which sites should be hubs and which should not?  
    Portal a HUB. 

    Team sites as a HUB where it makes sense (i.e. many related sites and audience).

  4. I see that you allow employees to create sites on demand. Do you automatically associate these sites with a hub or at least create a link to the site from somewhere? 
    No. They can request it through their site owner or IT. Most aren't really aware of the HUB functionality and its something we (IT) suggest.

 

If you want to discuss further over Teams, PM me and can sort something out.

 

I hope this helps.

 

Norm