Let's start by talking about the modern
SharePoint information architecture. As
you probably know, there's lots of talks
those days about modern SharePoint. Modern
SharePoint was introduced in 2015 and the
first type of site to be introduced was a
modern team site. Since then, Microsoft
released more stuff inside, but only in
2018 Microsoft released the missing piece
in information architecture called hub
sites. Those days most organizations are
building on modern SharePoint, as
Microsoft is not making any new
investments on classic SharePoint at all
and there's no specific date yet, but it
will eventually go away. Let's first look
at how the information architecture was
done for the last 15 years in SharePoint.
We had site collections, and under site
collections we had sub‑sites, which in
turn could have other sub‑sites
underneath. Between site collections and
sub‑sites underneath, the permissions,
navigation, and branding can all be
inherited, so meaning that if you want to,
of course, you can have consistency across
that site collection. If we look at an
Internet example, we would have, for
example, an intranet work site collection
with three sub‑sites underneath called
Marketing, IT, and HR. An under HR, we
could have to sub‑sites, Policies and
Managers, and managers can have their
permission inheritance broken while
keeping branding and navigation. Classic
SharePoint had a ton of available
templates from team sites, publishing
sites, to more specialized ones like
document workspace, enterprise wiki,
records center, and more. Now let's talk
about modern. With modern SharePoint, the
goal is to really cut down sub‑sites and
only have site collections. A site
collection can also be registered or
promoted to a hub site, and then you can
link other site collections to it. By
linking multiple site collections to a hub
site, navigation and branding will be
inherited from the hub site, so the
experience across sites will be similar.
However, permissions are still completely
independent between site collection, so
each site collection has independent
permissions. So with the modern intranet,
every department site, let's say, is a
site collection, which can have the same
or different permissions than the parent
hub. By having everything as a site
collection, you also have less chances of
hitting the limits of SharePoint Online
since each site is really a site
collection. And because it's all site
collections, it's also very flexible. So
let's say that in this example, if the NA
sales organization moves from under the
North American division to under the Sales
division, you can simply detach it from
the current hub and attach it to another
hub. It's super simple and as soon as it's
attached to the Sales hub, it's
automatically inherited the branding and
navigation from the Sales hub. And you
don't have to do any real migration as you
would have to do if it was a sub‑site.
Because all the content remains in the
site collection, simply detached from the
NA hub, attach it to the Sales hub, and
that is it. With modern SharePoint, we
also greatly simplified the templates. We
only really have templates, team site and
communication site. However, there are two
types of team sites. First of all, you
have a modern, standalone team site, as
well as a team site connected to an Office
365 group. So what is an Office 365 group?
An Office 365 group is a collection of
Office 365 resources that our integrated
to make collaboration easier. Each Office
365 group comes with a shared inbox, a
SharePoint site, a planner plan and
optionally a Microsoft team. When you
create a group connected team site, it
will create for you all of the other
resources. But if you create a team site
without an Office 365 group, you can
always connect an Office 365 group around
it later, no problem, and you'll often see
the term groupified when we reference to
this action. So you're going to groupify
team site. Just a quick note on Office 365
groups, this course will really focus on
managing SharePoint Online, but there will
soon be a course on Pluralsight, and maybe
by the time you watch this course it's
already out there, called Configuring and
Managing Microsoft Teams and Office 365
Groups, that will really focus on the
managing of Office 365 groups. But this
course we're really only going to focus on
SharePoint. Also, a note about hub sites.
Hub sites are not a site template. You
cannot go into new and create a new hub
site. They are a modern team site or
communication site that is registered as a
hub. This can be done via PowerShell or
via the SharePoint Admin Center. Also,
something that I want to note is that
traditionally we have used the term site
collection and sub‑site as terms for
SharePoint. And often when we talked about
site, it only meant sub‑site. That is
changing, and Microsoft is now using the
term site instead of site collections,
since we're not supposed to use sub‑sites
anymore. So from now on, instead of site
collection, I will follow Microsoft's
naming convention, and I will use the word
site when referring to site collections,
but I will be honest with you, after 10
years of using SharePoint and 10 years of
using site collection as the term, it
might slip one or two times in the course,
despite my best intentions. But just so
you know, site collections are now
referred to as sites. Really, when I will use sites, it will mean site collections.