SharePoint Hub Site: Pros & Cons

As the name suggests, SharePoint hub site is a central place for linking other sites and creating a universal navigation layer for the sites connected. SharePoint hub sites help businesses meet their organizational needs by joining and organizing sites by projects, departments, divisions, regions, and more. The site hubs aggregate and transmit information from the connected touchpoints. It helps businesses to discover related content like news and other site activities, apply similar navigation and branding across linked sites, and search across all the associated locations.

The SharePoint Hub Site also allows association with various teams and communication sites and has the following features:

1. Navigational structure
2. Logo
3. Look and feel
4. Scoped search

Let’s have a look at the various pros and cons of SharePoint Hub Site

Pros

• SharePoint Hub Sites are all about connecting multiple workplaces to share, manage, and navigate the content or app irrespective of the device you are using. The shared theme creates consistency and unifies different teams and sites that might be actively working with each other.
• The scoped search feature of hub sites simplifies the content discovery and allows the search results to include content from all the associated websites.
• Hub site provides a great way to pore over the conversations the users are having across all the projects.
• It offers flexibility to the intranet's information architecture and allows seamless modification of significant organizational structures.
• It comes with a layer added above hub’s site-level navigation, which allows hassle-free global navigation for connected sites.
• SharePoint Hub Site also offers the ability to send branding elements from the Hub site to any of the connected sites. It provides a standard component to the branding, which helps users identify the relevant web locations through the shared logo, color scheme, theme, and more.
• They enable ease of switching sites from Hub A to B with just a simple configuration and without any coding.

Cons

• The team & communications sites, custom configured or built portals for publishing sites, and other features of hub sites seem more valuable for large enterprises having complex intranets. However, there is a scope for simplifying the actual sites connection and “global” navigation element to make SharePoint Hub Site a useful addition for smaller intranets too.
• It lacks a robust management tool to give insights into managing users across the whole Office 365 ecosystem.
• It does not offer admins a central place for usage and adoption reporting.
• It lacks management, backup & security of user content, permissions and others.

Microsoft SharePoint Hub Site is an excellent tool for developing sites in SharePoint intranet. It helps organizations to share, collate and retrieve information in a robust way. Built on a sturdy Microsoft technology, it is an ideal solution for businesses having a significant investment in Microsoft technologies as they can have support for their hub sites via a shared infrastructure.