Strange behavior in Hub site permissions

[Frank-Ove Kristiansen]

Hi,

We are experiencing some strange issues after associating some sites to a hub site. Here's the thing:

We have four associated sites. When creating news on these sites, they are aggregated to the hub site (as expected). 

One user sees all the news articles on the hub sites, but several other users only see some of them (or maybe no news at all).

When opening the home page on the hub site in Edit mode, we can see the problem in the News web part. The one user that sees all the news, gets all the associated sites listed under the "Sites associated with this hub" property. But the other users only see some (or none) sites!

Anyone have any idea what might cause this?

It is worth pointing out that all the users have been added to the associated sites, and have Full Control to all of them.

Thanks,

Frank

[#2]

Check your permissions on your root SharePoint site under https://tenant.sharepoint.com/
If your users don't have access to this site, it's caused issues with Hub rollups.

[#3]

Thank you for your reply, Christopher!
I do have access to the root SharePoint site, since the company's main intranet is located there. However, I only have Read access (Visitors group).
Do I need more access? If not, can anyone see what else might cause this?

EDIT: The employee that actually see all the sites, also only have Read access on the root site.

Thanks again,
Frank

[#4]

This may have already come up but, if the user does not have access to the site, they will not see news from that site when aggregated to the Hub Site. 

However, you can get around that by giving them read access to Site Pages and Site Assets > Site Pages on the associated site. 

Disclaimer:  This may not be a best practice but, it's one we currently employ to solve for HR-related news in our org as we cannot give everyone access to the HR site, for example.

[#5]

Yeah Frank said they have full control to those sites with the news on them? Make sure that you didn't break inheritance to the Site pages libraries would be one other thing you can check to make sure they have permissions to.

Also, you need to follow / visit sites I think for them to show up in that list for filters on the hub news settings so some users may not show up here.

If you go to each site as the users that don't see news in the hub, can they access and see the news on those sites?

You may end up needing to re-index your tenant possibly as much of this is based around search index/graph.

[#6]

Hi again,

I access all these sites quite frequently all day, and have all the necessary permissions. If I open the sites, I can see the news in the web part on the front page.

I tested with granting myself permissions on one of the sites. This is basically re-assigning permissions, because I already have Full control. 

I receive the email Welcoming me to the group site also, so all good so far.

I go up to the hub site and edit the News web part, and voila! The site is now displayed under "Sites associated with the Hub site". And if I check it, the news from that site is also being aggregated up to the hub site.

Any idea what might cause this? 

Aside: The sites were originally created by an administrator back in early June. Could that have something to do with it? Is it possible she created the groups and its associated sites using Outlook?

[#7]

It might have to do with a permission bug on group sites. Dean or John had this issue recently and put a bug with Microsoft where they couldn’t search when they were in the Sharepoint owners group of a site or something similar. Let me see if I get a chance to find that post but might be related.

[#8 · Accepted solution]

Here is the post. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/User-In-Owner-Role-No-Search-Results/m-p/206311


I'm almost betting this is related, due to the fact that you added yourself to the actual group which adds them to the member group on the site vs. owner group. Try adding yourself to the members group on the other sites, or others instead of owners and see if it fixes the issue.

[#9]

Thanks Christopher,

I can confirm that this is the same issue we're facing. 

Thank you for your help!

Kind Regards,

Frank

[#10]

How did you go about giving users permissions to Site Pages and Assets?  Or better yet, have you found another way to do this?  I am ok if the user has access to the site as long as they do not have access to their files (document library) as this is where confidential information will be stored. 

[#11]

I confirm we are getting the same behavior