This document discusses how hub sites in SharePoint can help raise its potential for intranets. It describes hub sites as connecting and organizing sites based on attributes like department or region. This allows for common navigation, branding, and search across associated sites. Key features of hub sites include common themes, shared navigation, news and content rollups, and search across linked sites. The document provides examples of how hub sites can be used and tips for configuration. It also discusses some limitations and alternatives for building modern intranets like third-party solutions and open source options.

1. How Hub Sites Raise SharePoint's Intranet Potential?
Knut Relbe-Moe
Product Evangelist & Partner Manager Valo,
Founder DocsNode, MVP

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Knut Relbe-Moe
knut@valointranet.com
https://linkedin.com/in/shareptkarm@shareptkarm

6. Modern Intranet

7. The Modern
Intranet...
• ...provides personalized
experiences for the end user
• ...works anywhere, with any
device
• ...has a modern, beatiful design
• ...leverages the most recent
experiences available in the
Microsoft platform
• ...is built using the most recent
development frameworks
available
• ...is highly customizable for
customers

8. What is hub sites

9. Hub Sites
Source: Microsoft

10. From Microsoft:
SharePoint hub sites help you meet the needs of
your organization by connecting and organizing
sites based on project, department, division,
region, etc. making it easier to:
• discover related content such as news and other site activities,
• apply common navigation and branding across associated sites,
• search across all associated sites.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-is-a-sharepoint-
hub-site-fe26ae84-14b7-45b6-a6d1-948b3966427f

11. Hub sites allow us to eliminate the inflexibility
and governance limitations of “dreaded”
subsites, while providing a way to replicate one
of the key benefits of subsites — a way to create
a shared experience among related sites. Hub
sites can help kill subsites, but not without a little
planning. (Susan Hanley)
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3280102/enterprise-
applications/6-tips-for-planning-sharepoint-hub-sites.html

12. Features of the hub sites

13. Common theme
• Helps so that all sites in the hub
should have the same theme
and look and feel
• great from common
branding/user adoption
standpoint

14. Shared common navigation and footer
• Common
navigation for all
your sites, choose
betwen
Megamenu and
cascading
• Add a footer to
your hub, to give
more navigation
options

15. New megamenu layout for site and
hub navigation -

16. Search within a Hub

17. News roll up

18. Content roll-up via HCWP

19. So how shall we use Hub Sites?

20. The Earth is flat…
Intranet
TeamworkAbout UsInternal Services What’s New
Company Presentation
Our Locations
Leadership
…
Forms
Human Resources
Information Technology
…
Classifieds
Event Hub
Latest video
…

21. The Earth is flat…
Intranet
TeamworkAbout Us
Internal Services What’s New
Intranet Hub
https://love.valointranet.com/download-the-ebook-a-modern-
site-architecture

22. Ebook on how to build Modern Site
Architecture
https://love.valointranet.com/download-the-ebook-a-modern-site-
architecture

23. Planning your hub sites

24. Planning your hub sites

25. Planning your hub sites

26. WHAT ARETHE USE CASES FORTHE
HUB SITES?

27. Use Case 1: Small business
• One hub site just to create an Intranet
• One project hub site to collect all project sites in a hub

28. Use Case 2: Medium or large size
organization
Need at least one and possibly multiple Hub Sites
• Communication Site for Employee HR
• PrivateTeam site (Office 365 Group) for HR team itself
• Communication Site Marketing
• PrivateTeam site (Office 365 Group) for Marketing
• One Marketing hub and one HR Hub for instance.

29. Use Case 3: Project Management
• Create one hub to collect all your project sites so you can for instance
use the site webpart to liftup all your project sites.

30. Recommended webparts

31. News Roll-up

32. News Roll-up
New published on a hubsites and associated sites is automatically
aggregated
Choose which associated sites to display news from
Users will only see news they have access to

33. Highlighted content

34. Highlighted content
Use the Highlighted content web part to dynamically display content
from sites associated with the hub site on the home page.
Select the sites you want to show information from
Select the type of content you want to show, and apply different
filters to also narrow down the result

35. Associated sites

36. Associated sites
Display the most active sites associated with the hub site on the home
page by using the Sites web part. And choose the layout you want

37. Events web part rolls up events from
associated sites -

38. Other features

39. Create associated site from within
hub site itself

40. Create, associate/disassociate, plus report
on hub sites in the SharePoint admin center
in Office 365

41. Summary

42. What does hub sites offer
• They add a consistent branding across all sites
• They add a persistent menu, making it easier to move between the
linked sites.
• If you search within the hub site, it will also search all linked sites.
• A handy news digest option lets you collate selected news stories to
go out as an email summary, with images and links.
• We recently also got content targeting
• And we will also get publishing workflow/flow

43. Hub Site Limitations
• Sites linked into a hub site can only be associated with one hub site.
• Hubs can’t be nested, limiting their potential for a corporate portal
• No fix for multiple languages
Source, Sam Marshall: https://www.cmswire.com/digital-workplace/hub-sites-raise-sharepoints-
intranet-potential/

44. Configuration tips
• You can always detach a site from a Hub if you want to attach it to another hub site in
the future.
• News, once posted on an associated site, typically takes 5–15mins to index and roll-up
to the Hub
• Hubs do not influence permissions.
• Cross site navigation means that the associated sites will have two top level navigation
bars — the hub site navigation and the current site navigation.
• Hubs will work with the SharePoint mobile app, so consider communicating to end
users which hubs they should follow or find
• You can setup your hub to require approvals. That way, not anyone would be able to
attach to a hub but instead they would have to be approved by the hub Site Owner

45. So does hub site helps us
with our Modern
SharePoint Intranet?

47. What other options do we have?

48. SharePoint Modern Starter Kit
https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-starter-kit

49. 3rd party vendors

50. 3rd party vendors

51. 3rd party vendors

52. Providers – A lot different, so you just need
to find the one you trust and loves.
https://www.clearbox.co.uk/portfolio-item/sharepoint-
intranets-in-a-box-report-second-edition/
•Attini from Rapid Circle
•Attollo Intranet, from Red Plane
•Bonzai from Dynamic Owl
•EasyShare from Easy SharePoint
•FLEX from ICS Solutions
•Gimmal Intranet and Portals from Gimmal
•Go Intranet Accelerator from Habanero
•Hadron from Cloud Two
•Hoozin, from Hoozin
•Injio from Webvine
•InterChange Digital Workplace from Akumina
•Kasama from Circle T
•Kira from CompanyNet
•LiveTiles SharePoint from Live Tiles
•LS Intranet from Lizard Soft
•Omnia from Prescio Fishbone AB
•OneWindow Workplace from Portal Solutions
•PortalGo! from Rhipe
•Powell 365 from Powell Software
•Rise from Perficient
•Simplify from Content Formula
•SP Intranet from SP Marketplace
•Unily from Brightstarr
•Valo Intranet from Blue Meteorite
•Wizdom from Webtop
•Work Platform Prime from Emgage

53. Collab 365 Directory
• https://collab365.directory/office365-sharepoint/best-sharepoint-
intranet-templates/#prettyPhoto

54. Extend the current webparts of the
modern pages:
• https://github.com/OlivierCC/spfx-40-fantastics

55. MegaMenu -
• https://www.masthead365.com/

56. Thank you!