Every time you create an Office 365 Group or a Communication site – a new site collection is provisioned! So whether you want it or not, now you are almost forced into a flat architecture. Things started to swing in favor of flat architecture (read: no subsites) with the rollout of Office 365 Groups and Communication Sites. Joanne Klein, a prominent and world-renowned SharePoint consultant had written a very detailed post on the pros and cons of subsites and flat architecture. I have documented some of my thoughts on it here. folders) and most of the time was a matter of the individual preference. Site Collection approach was always a debate in the SharePoint community (just like metadata vs. On top of that, you could also create site templates and reuse them.

What made a single site collection really attractive to many (including me) is that you could easily build common navigation between all the subsites. With the arrival of SharePoint Online and Office 365, we had many small businesses embrace SharePoint now and most small, and even medium-size businesses could get away with just 1 or 2 site collections. Multiple Site collections always made sense for large organizations. Provision lots of department sites (each in its own site collection) and lots of subsites in each department’s site collection (for various repositories, department projects, etc.). Of course, you could have both models run in parallel. You would either create one big site collection and create lots of subsites in it, or you would have lots and lots of site collections in your tenant. Historically (and this goes back to old versions of SharePoint on-premises), we only had two primary ways to structure sites in SharePoint. So, with this post, I would like to explain what the fuss is all about, what the hub sites are, how to create them, what are the use cases for them and whether or not you need them. Hub Sites became the new coolest thing and the new buzzword.

Ever since Microsoft announced Hub Site functionality last year, SharePoint community literally has gone meshugana over it.

How to add a site to top sites