Adoption

How to manage the SharePoint Hub Sites associations

Laurent Sittler
3 min read

Are you waiting for it? We are too 😄 the capability to associate a SharePoint Hub Site to another one. The good news is, the PowerShell cmdlet has existed for a couple of weeks now (at least):

and now, the cmdlet works 💪🏻 (currently on targeted environment only)  and moreover, the SharePoint central admin allows to manage the parent hubs too!

What is a Hub Site?

SharePoint Hub sites concept

In short, a SharePoint hub site creates a relation between several SharePoint sites that brings you the capabilities to:

  • Have a "global navigation" between the associated sites in addition to the navigation per site
  • Enforce a site theme for the associated site
  • Scope the data across the associated sites
  • Perform research scoped across the associated sites
  • Sync Hub permissions (visitors only) to associated sites

[note] Note

A tenant can host up to 2,000 hub sites max

For more information, everything is well explained by Microsoft here:

What is a SharePoint hub site?

What does a parent Hub site mean?

SharePoint Hub site with a parent hub site

In theory (because while I am writing these lines, nothing changes), this kind of association should only:

  • Scope the data across the associated sites
  • Perform research scoped across the associated sites

How to associate a Hub Site with another one?

The parent hub association can be created only from the SharePoint admin center or via PowerShell cmdlet.

PowerShell

Before you begin, you must ensure that you have the below prerequisites:

Based on the above SharePoint sites schema, we have two Hub sites with the following information:

Site Name URL ID
Intranet /sites/intranet 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001
HR /sites/intranet-hr 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000002

[success] Tip

To retrieve your SharePoint site Id, from your favorite browser, use the REST API URL /sites/intranet/_api/sites/id

With this information in mind, we can now associate these two Hub sites - the intranet as the parent hub and HR as "sub-hub":

Add-SPOHubToHubAssociation -Source 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000002 -Target 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001
Associate a SharePoint Hub site to another one

If for any reason, you need to disassociate a sub-hub, you can use the following cmdlet:

Remove-SPOHubToHubAssociation -HubSiteId 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000002
Remove a Hub sites association

SharePoint central admin

From the SharePoint central admin, follow these steps to associate an existing Hub site to a parent Hub site:

  1. Select the SharePoint "sub-hub site" from the "Active sites" list
  2. Select the Hub tab
  3. Click on Edit hub site settings
  4. Select the parent hub site association
  5. Click Save

SharePoint admin center - Hub site settings

Result

From the SharePoint parent Hub site, you can see:

SharePoint parent hub site settings panel

From the SharePoint sub-hub site, you can see:

Focus on parent hub site settings

If you need more information about planning SharePoint hub sites in your environment:



Hoping this post will help you 😉

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