How do we set up SharePoint hub sites smartly for an SMB of 20 to 100 people?
Hubs get overused or ignored entirely. For SMB a flat structure with 1 or 2 hubs usually beats a deeply layered model. Too many hubs and people get lost. Too few and you end up with 40 loose sites without navigation.
Try this first
- 1Start with: how do you think about work? Per department (sales, operations, finance), per customer, or per project? That decides whether you build a department hub, a customer hub, or both.
- 2Build one 'intranet hub' as the landing for all internal sites (HR, policies, news, handbook). Communication sites with department info hang under it. This is the evergreen layer.
- 3Optionally build a second hub for customer or project work. Team sites per customer or project hang under it. Those get cleaned up periodically, that's part of operations. The intranet hub doesn't.
- 4Avoid nested hubs (hub of hubs). SharePoint supports it in a limited way, but navigation gets messy and search ranks less predictably.
- 5Set hub navigation from the hub site itself, not per site separately. Links to the top 6-8 sub-sites. More than that and people get lost.
- 6Document somewhere (in the intranet hub itself, ironic) how new sites get added: who creates them, which template, which hub. Otherwise a year later you have 80 loose sites because everyone made one.
When to bring us in
If you already have a growing site jungle without hub structure and want order, half a day of drawing this together with IT and a few business colleagues is gold. Restructuring once it's in production is much more expensive.
See also
- Outlook crashes or freezes on large attachmentsUsually the mailbox cache is the culprit, not Outlook itself. Shrinking or relocating usually helps within ten minutes.
- Teams: they cannot hear me, or I hear nothingIn our experience Teams usually picked the wrong audio device after a Windows update or a new headset.
- OneDrive has stopped syncingThe cloud icon is grey or has a warning. Locally changed files are not showing up for colleagues.
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