I feel that in modern SharePoint we are very much been directed towards hub sites; indeed each time a user makes a group we are in a different site collection. I understand all the arguments about simplicity vs hierarchical sites in classic SharePoint. But I think I see a couple of snags in this model. I am interested to know whether I am wrong, have missed a solution or whether this would be something that will be addressed.
I will give a specific example. In one of my tenants I work with a local government organisation (I am the mayor at the moment).
When we started using SharePoint (just before modern) we came up with a hierarchical design that used lookups and site columns to achieve much of what we wanted. [actually we failed because we found that calculated columns using lookups exposed a bug when we tried to reference them as fields in word - they always returned the index number of lookup item rathe than the data [and we were told there be no fix] and once modern UI appeared we found that our documents sets (with no modern support) we too baffling to users (the whole interface changed). We were promised a rapid solution to that but 3 years later we are still waiting - I believe modern document sets are due next month1
Anyway we have tow pieces of metadata that apply to virtually everything we do - Committee and meeting date (every document belongs o one of the committees or working groups and usually to a particular meeting date).
My issues are that in the new model (and we love groups - they are exactly right to allow staff to spin up an quick environment for a working group when it forms) I don't there is any way to ensure that every site (e.g. group) has the same metadata (columns). What I feel I want is "tenant columns" [that apply to all sites in my tenant) or some way to tell a site to inherit columns from its hub site.
Secondly, I wood like the committee column to lookup against a single list library somewhere of all the committees.
In a modern hub enviornemnt I don;t think that's possible. agin i feel tat i want to be able to reference a lsit that exists in the hub site or be able to have some kid of tenant library that was avilable to all sites.
Any ways around this? Can I do this already and haven't noticed how? Is this an issue that others can see as problem and are there likley to be any solutions?
If I went back to hierarchical is my feeling that I am swimming against the tide correct i.e. I expect that MS will continue to support hierarchical sites but will I find that more and more new features won't work in my sites?
