The Microsoft online ecosystem – SharePoint sites
You may have noticed; Microsoft have been busy re-engineering SharePoint and investing in the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem with some enthusiasm over the past decade.
This article is designed to give a simple explanation to the different SharePoint sites you might come across with intranet development in mind.
Modern SharePoint Site Templates
There are essentially two site templates available in the modern SharePoint online experience, the Communications site template, and the Team site template.
This differs from the classic SharePoint experience where there were a host of different site templates for publishing, collaboration, forums, blogs, document management, enterprise search etc.
The modern world is simplified yet flexible. Modern site templates are built on a totally new technical architecture called SPFx. Because of the evergreen nature of the cloud environment, Microsoft have built this new framework to be robust when new features are launched. The older classic model was subject to easy manipulation and bespoke code deployment that would frequently brake as new SharePoint features rolled out. The new method of deploying code to SharePoint is considerably more complex, yet it uses open-source technologies many developers will be familiar with.
Communication Sites
Communication site templates are designed for publishing. They are typically used for intranets.
Communication sites are standalone. They are independent site collections with their own server resource, document and page libraries, permissions, plus other assets.
They also form the bedrock for a couple of other site types that will be commonly used for intranets, these are the Hub Site and the Home Site detailed below.
Team Sites
Team Sites come in two forms; group connected, and non-group connected.
Group Connected Team Sites are designed for team collaboration. A Microsoft Office 365 Group is created when a Team Site is deployed. Team members can access a number of connected collaboration tools, such as: mail inbox, exchange calendar, Teams, Stream, Planner etc.
Team sites are typically private and therefore unlikely to be included within an intranet. However, public Team sites can be created whereby anyone in the organisation can become a member and perhaps better suited to intranets, although rarely used in this contex.
Non-group connect Team sites are mostly deployed for document and record management tasks, whereby the M365 Group connectivity is not required.
Hub Site
Hub sites typically use the communication site template and are registered via the SharePoint administration portal. A Hub site acts as the ‘mother’ site to other ‘associated’ sites. The use of sub-sites is no longer suggested; therefore, the Hub site acts as the top-level site within a hierarchy of sites.
Multiple Hub sites can be deployed within a Microsoft Office 365 tenancy. At the time of writing, a Hub site can not be ‘associated’ with another Hub site, although the Microsoft Roadmap suggests this will be possible (circa Q1 2022).
Hub sites are responsible for:
- Global navigation – pushed to all associated sites
- Theme (branding) - pushed to all associated sites
- Visitor permissions / Hub permissions – pushed to all associated sites.
- Search conducted at the hub site will include search results from all the associated sites
Hub sites are commonly used as the landing site (home page) for the corporate intranet.
Home Site
The Home Site was launched in 2020, although functionality was little different to Hub sites. Since then, the Home Site is becoming more relevant with expanded features which lend themselves to the intranet, such as:
- Organisational level search
- Mobile app home icon (navigation)
- Authoritative organisational news site (default)
- Integration between the SharePoint start page*
- Team app for connectivity to the intranet within Teams*
- Additional navigation mechanism*
*Some of these features are yet to be released at the time of writing (March 2021).