Office 365 Hub Sites Are Here! A Few Tips

It’s great to see the Hub Sites promised at Ignite last fall rolling out finally. Hub Sites will be the capability which allows us to associate related “modern” sites with each other. This is probably most common in Intranets, but other examples might be a set of Project sites, a multi-layered HR sites, etc. Keep in mind that the maximum number of Hub Sites today is 50, so plan carefully. (That’s a bigger number than you think, in most cases.)

I’ve been able to play with them a little in my tenant, and I thought I’d post a few observations based on confusion I felt as well as questions I’ve seen. You can read all the nitty-gritty details in this post from Mark Kashman (@mkashman) Organize your intranet with SharePoint hub sites, but here’s what I felt I needed to know.

To setup a new Hub Site in your Office 365 tenant, you only need to run a little Powershell. (I wish the way we have to first work with new capabilities was never spelled P-o-w-e-r-s-h-e-l-l, but that’s what it is. Build us a UI!) I don’t run Powershell all that often, so I needed a little refresher. Here are the steps:

• Open the SharePoint Online Management Shell. If you haven’t installed it yet, you can download it here.
• Run the following command:

  Connect-SPOService -Url https://YourTenant-admin.sharepoint.com -Credential $userCredential
  Register-SPOHubSite https://YourTenant.sharepoint.com/sites/YourHubSite

  Yes, you must be a SharePoint Admin (or above) to do this. If you aren’t one, go bake your SharePoint Admin some chocolate chip cookies.

  One thing to add, from Beau Cameron on Twitter. The latest SharePoint Online Management Shell now asks for Principals  as a part of Register-SPOHubsite  command. You can create a hub site without it, by just hitting “enter”. This is all a moving target!

  

• If you are fine with any Site Owner adding their site to this Hub Site, you can stop here. However, you’ll probably want to lock it down to a specific set of people. To do this, you create a mail-enabled group and give it permission to add sites to the Hub Site. For my Hub Site at /sites/Intranet, this goes like:

  Connect-SPOService -Url https://YourTenant-admin.sharepoint.com -Credential $userCredential
  Grant-SPOHubSiteRights -Identity https://sympraxis.sharepoint.com/sites/Intranet -Principals [email protected] -Rights Join

If the Powershell runs successfully, you’ll see a response that looks something like this:

The SiteId  there is what will become the Managed Property DepartmentId  in your search schema. The DepartmentId  is applied to content in the associated sites, which enables the content roll ups we get in Hub Sites.

BTW, if you’re just playing around and you want to demote the Hub Site to a regular site, you can run the Unregister-SPOHubSite  cmdlet.

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I ran the Powershell and I have a new Hub Site. I’ve associated one other “modern” site with it. A few questions came to me immediately as I poked around. Melissa Torres at Microsoft was kind enough to answer my questions on the Tech Community,

After I set a new theme on the Hub Site, is there a lag before I see it on the associated site(s)?

Yes it’s not automatic, can take up to 2 hours.

I have two different browser tabs open to the Hub Site. I manually added a link to the associated site in one tab, but don’t see it in the other, even after a Ctrl-F5. My guess is something is cached that shouldn’t be.

Correct it is due to caching. We’re working on addressing this issue of switching between tabs.

I published a News item in the associated site, but don’t see it in the Hub Site. What’s the delay supposed to be there? Are all News items rolled up?

We use search to rollup content from the associated sites so it’s subject to that, and yes all news items rollup.

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In case you were wondering, the HubNav ends up right below the Top placeholder, and above the mainContent.

 

Don’t have access to a Hub Site? Having questions about how it all works? Feel free to add your questions in the comments, and I’ll try to reply with answers.

References

• • Organize your intranet with SharePoint hub sites by Mark Kashman (@mkashman)
  • Implement security trimmed navigation in your Hub Site by Beau Cameron (@Beau__Cameron)
  • PowerShell cmdlets for SharePoint hub sites, originally by Vesa Juvonen (@VesaJuvonen)