SharePoint Online navigation updates: hubs and Home sites
In this post, we revisit SharePoint navigation concepts to discuss the major updates since we last covered the topic.
The fundamentals haven’t changed since our last post – a portal’s information architecture shifts to a ‘flat architecture’ with SharePoint Online and administrators create sites (previously called site collections), instead of a network of sites and sub-sites. These sites can be connected through the Hubs feature.
What are the benefits of Hubs again?
Hubs are designed to connect a network of sites that fall under a common topic such as a “Corporate Hub”, “HR Hub” or “Projects Hub.”
Hubs are similar to connecting sites and sub-sites, but with a few more superpowers than sub-sites. These include being easier to move around, a shared navigation across the sites in a hub, and content discovery for news, events and highlighted content. The search experience is defaulted to search across the hub as well.
How do permissions work?
One question we get about grouping sites under Hubs is how to manage permissions.
Visitor permissions can be (optionally) pushed to Hubs. Site owners are not required to sync site permissions with hub permissions to associate to the hub. This means that sites can still contain sensitive information and remain associated to the hub.
In most cases though, you probably want people who have access to a hub site to also have access to the associated sites, and any that are created in the future. To do this, go to a Hub site’s Settings > Site Permissions > Hubs tab. This will let you sync the visitors between associated sites:
Sync permissions from a Hub to the associated sites
Note: Microsoft limits this setting to 10 users or groups, so make sure you have a Visitors group setup that you can reuse for organization-wide sites.
For more information and limitations, review the Microsoft article: Hub permissions.
Associate a hub to another hub…why?
One of the perceived limitations of a flat hierarchy with Hubs, is that they don’t scale well and seem disorganized. Some also found the search results limiting as they didn’t include related content that might be in another Hub.
Microsoft is trying to address this with the ability to associate hubs with other hubs. This is a feature that was released since the writing of our last article about SharePoint navigation.
Hub to hub association is configured in SharePoint administration by registering a root Hub site, then registering child hubs and associating those hubs with the root Hub.
Doing this creates a structure that starts to look like a sub-site hierarchy again:
Hub hierarchy example with a root intranet site, and 2 levels of child hubs.
This feature was added based on customer feedback, but it is confusing. The hub hierarchy does not display in navigation, and the only visible user experience change is an expanded set of search results.
Even though you’re creating this hierarchy behind-the-scenes, it doesn’t automatically replicate in the navigation experience.
Associating hubs with hubs results in an expanded search scope. When a user does a search, the search results have a breadcrumb at the top to let users expand their results. In this example, the breadcrumb shows the root intranet Hub “The Buzz”, the parent HR Hub, and the site the user is searching from called “HR Canada”:
Example of sub-hub search results
Note: don’t test this at the root or parent Hub as the breadcrumb is not displayed at this level. The use case is to expand results when you’re on a “sub-hub” so that you don’t miss any potential results.
One of the areas of confusion we see with our clients is that the navigation doesn’t inherit and doesn’t automatically stay-up-to-date across the hubs that are associated. To create a global navigation that goes across several Hubs, you need to update the labels and URLs manually on each Hub. This is doable if you have 2 or 3 Hubs that are associated and can assign an Intranet Owner who is responsible for maintaining navigation. However, for larger employee portals this creates too much overhead. In these cases, we use a PowerShell script to sync the navigation labels and URLs across Hubs. Reach out for advice if you want to take this approach.
Learn more about hub association in this Microsoft article: Associate a hub site to another hub site in the SharePoint admin center - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Docs
Home sites
In 2020, Microsoft launched Home sites. This is an important concept when planning your SharePoint site structure.
A Home site is a special communication site that is assigned as the landing page of your employee portal or intranet. It’s important to have one when rolling out a new intranet because it’s the starting point where news, events, and other organization information is rolled up. It also has a search box that searches everything in the organization by default.
A Home site is a special communication site that is assigned as the landing page of your employee portal or intranet.
There can only be one home site in a SharePoint environment currently (this is changing to up to 10 Home sites in 2023). The Home site is usually a Hub site as well, but note that you can’t assign it to another Hub. Most often, our clients assign the site that is at the root of the environment as the Home site, where the URL is something like this: mycompany.sharepoint.com.
The Home site is configured in SharePoint Administration settings or PowerShell. There’s a good deep dive into how to configure the Home site from the Microsoft product team in this video.
So how does the Home site affect navigation? It’s a critical step in using the SharePoint app bar and the global navigation. In case this is a new concept, here’s what the SharePoint app bar looks like on a desktop browser:
SharePoint app bar on the left side of SharePoint sites, image courtesy of Microsoft
The Home icon can be customized, and we usually replace it with the intranet logo. Clicking it displays the Global Navigation, as seen in this example:
Global navigation with a custom logo
For the logo, Microsoft recommends a PNG file that is 20px x 20px and a transparent background. Detailed instructions are here.
The global navigation settings have the option to show the Home site navigation OR the hub / global navigation. To change this go to the Home site > Settings > Global Navigation:
Global navigation settings
With the global navigation setting, you have options on sources. If your Home site is a Hub, the source could be either:
Option 1: The site navigation that is part of the Home site
Option 2: The overall Hub navigation.
In this example, here is Hub vs. Site navigation:
Hub vs. site navigation
This is what happens in each option:
Option 1: With Home site navigation
Option 2: Hub / global navigation
The app bar is a critical part of a new intranet or employee portal in SharePoint, so make sure you have the Hub or Home site navigation display items that make sense to show everywhere via the app bar. It takes a bit of design planning, but this is absolutely a required step to enable a great navigation experience in SharePoint.
More navigation questions?
Navigation is a complex topic with many variations and options, so reach out if you have any questions about the topic! We’d be happy to chat.
