What is a Hub Site

A SharePoint hub site enables you to organise multiple team sites and communication sites by associating them with a common "hub site" in SharePoint. SharePoint hub sites provide a common navigational structure, look and feel, and the ability to search across the associated sites. You can use SharePoint Online hub sites to organise teams, divisions, or resources throughout your organisation.

SharePoint Hub sites are also a great way to organise your Microsoft Teams sites or other SharePoint sites in MacroView DMS and DMS Pro as it displays the hub sites and their associated sites in an intuitive tree view.  MacroView DMS also allow you hide the sites associated with particular hub sites, making it easy to control which site you see and which you don't.

You can make any existing SharePoint site a hub site by registering it as a hub site in the SharePoint Online Admin Centre.  Once this is done you can then associate other sites with the hub site.

This article provides more information on hub sites and how to configure them.

Please note when you register the hub site, if there are any users listed under 'People who can associate sites with this hub', as illustrated below, only those users will be able to view the hub site. Currently this is treated as deny permission. Leave this field blank to ensure that the MacroView client returns hub sites based on the Hub sites permission tab elsewhere. 

Enabling Hub sites in MacroView DMS

If you have a SharePoint Online server configured in MacroView DMS, by default the tree view shows all site collections and sites you have access to directly below the SharePoint Online tenant node. 

When hub sites are enabled the tree view shows these sites grouped by the hub site they are associated with.

If none of the sites you have access to are associated with a hub site, the hub site level is not displayed and all sites will be listed directly below the SharePoint Online tenant node.

To enable hub sites check the Group Sites in Hubs option on the Advanced tab on the Server dialog under DMS options.

When this option is enabled the hub sites associated with any displayed sites are shown in the tree view as an additional level and any sites that are not associated with a hub site will be listed below the "Sites" node.

Hiding specific hub sites

When hub sites are enabled in MacroView DMS, you can hide all sites associated with a particular hub site by specifying the hub sites Title or GUID in the Hubs to ignore setting on the Advanced tab on the Server dialog under DMS options.

This is a great way to restrict the site collections and sites that are available in the MacroView DMS tree view without needing to change the site permissions in SharePoint.

To hide the Site group which contains all sites that are not associated with a hub site, enter 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 in the Hubs to ignore field.

When sites are hidden in this way, files in these sites can still be located using search, and if Navigate to URL or Open File Location are selected, the site and its associated hub site will be displayed in the tree view temporarily until the tree view is next refreshed.

Filtering when using Hub Sites

You can filter across all site collections by right-clicking the SharePoint Online tenant node and selecting Filter Site Collections or filter just the sites associated with a specific hub site by right-clicking on the hub site node and selecting Filter Site Collections. 

When hub sites are enabled filtering site collections at the top level of the tree behaves slightly differently to when they are not enabled. 

• A filter applied at the top level does not filter the hub sites but returns all site collections matching the filter criteria, grouped by their associated hub site. 
• The hub site nodes are initially collapsed after a filter or refresh. 
• You can filter just the site collections associated with a specific hub site then choose Filter Site Collections on the hub site node in the tree view.
• You can apply a filter at both the top level and hub site level in which case only sites that match both filter criteria under the selected hub site are returned.   

When a filter is applied only at the top level the hub site nodes do not display a filter icon as they do not have a hub specific filter applied.   To see all sites below a hub site you should first clear the filter from the top level node by right-clicking the tenant node and selecting Clear Filter.

Searching across all sites associated with a hub site

When you right-click on a hub site node in the DMS tree view the Search this Hub option will switch to Search mode with the search scope restricted to those sites associated with the selected hub site.

When searching across a specific hub site a message is displayed at the top of the search results pane. 

You can remove the hub site scope to search across all sites by clicking the Clear button. 

Known Issues:

If user do not have permissions on any hub site then they will not see any nodes at all but they can still search or filter to see sites within any hub as long as they have permissions on the sites within the hub. Please ensure users have read permissions on hub sites they need to see in DMS.

Version Support

• SharePoint Online
• MacroView DMS and DMS Pro 8.7.90 or later