Part Two – Creating Modern SharePoint Online Team Sites

In Part 1 we created a standalone Team Site with its Group, owners, and members. This part connects multiple Team Sites under a central Hub Site, sets up shared navigation, and uses audience targeting so users only see links relevant to their department.

Hub sites are the native alternative to building a sprawling sub-site hierarchy. They cascade branding, provide shared top navigation, aggregate news and activity, and enable tenant-wide search scoping — all without the rigid parent-child lock of classic SharePoint sub-sites.

What Hub Sites solve for SMBs

Register an existing site as a Hub

Any Communication Site or Team Site can be promoted to a Hub. The most common SMB pattern: promote the intranet homepage (Communication Site from Part 1 of the intranet series) to a Hub, then associate department Team Sites.

GUI path:

1. SharePoint admin center → Active Sites
2. Select the site to promote (the intranet homepage, usually)
3. Click Hub in the top menu → Register as hub site
4. Set the Hub display name (what appears in site selectors)
5. Choose which Entra ID groups can associate sites with this Hub — restrict to IT or SharePoint admins for governance
6. Click Save

PowerShell equivalent:

# Register an existing site as a hub
Connect-SPOService -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com

Register-SPOHubSite `
  -Site https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/intranet `
  -Principals @("SharePoint-Admins@company.com")

# Verify registration
Get-SPOHubSite | Select Title, SiteUrl, ID

Your tenant can have up to 2,000 hub sites, which is more than any SMB will ever need. Most of our clients run 1-3 hubs: a corporate intranet hub, optionally a regional hub for multi-country orgs, and sometimes a classified/sensitive hub for Legal and HR.

Associate Team Sites with the Hub

Once the Hub is registered, associating sites is a one-click operation per site. For bulk onboarding (e.g., migrating 10 department sites), script it.

GUI: from the Team Site itself, click the gear icon → Site information → Hub site association → pick the hub from the dropdown → Save.

PowerShell — bulk association:

# Associate multiple sites with the hub in one pass
$hubUrl = "https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/intranet"

$sites = @(
  "https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/finance-team"
  "https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/hr-team"
  "https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/sales-team"
  "https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/engineering"
)

foreach ($site in $sites) {
  Add-SPOHubSiteAssociation -Site $site -HubSite $hubUrl
  Write-Host "Associated: $site" -ForegroundColor Green
}

# Verify all associations
Get-SPOSite -Limit All | Where-Object HubSiteId -ne "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" | Select Url, Title

Within 30-60 seconds of association, the associated sites inherit the Hub’s top navigation, theme, and logo. The Hub home page can display aggregated news and activity from all associated sites via the News web part (set source to Select sites → the hub).

Hub navigation with audience targeting

By default, all users see all hub navigation links. With audience targeting, each link is tagged with an Entra ID group — only members of the targeted group see the link. This is how you hide the Finance Team Site link from everyone except Finance.

1. On the hub site home, click Edit in the top nav bar
2. Toggle Audience targeting at the top of the edit panel
3. For each link, click the … menu → Edit → enter target Entra ID groups in the Audiences field
4. Save the navigation

Users who aren’t members of any listed audience see no link. Users in at least one matching group see the link. This is visibility filtering only — it’s not a security boundary. If someone knows the URL directly, they can still try to access the site (and hit SharePoint permission checks there).

Wintive take: hub governance mistakes we keep seeing

1. Hub without an owner. If the person who registered the hub leaves the company, nobody can edit the shared navigation. Always assign a Hub administrators Entra ID group (at least 2 people) at registration time.
2. Confusing audience targeting with security. Hiding a nav link doesn’t prevent access to the site. Pair audience targeting with actual SharePoint permissions (Private Team Site + Group membership) — don’t rely on link hiding alone for confidential content.
3. Hub sprawl. We’ve seen tenants with 15+ hubs (one per department), none of them aggregated, each running its own navigation. Hubs are most useful when they aggregate. If a department doesn’t need shared navigation with other sites, it doesn’t need its own hub — a plain Team Site is fine.

Conclusion

You now have a Hub site with multiple Team Sites associated, shared navigation with audience targeting, and a reproducible PowerShell pattern to onboard new department sites with a single command.

Combined with the intranet Communication Site at the center and the brand theme from intranet Part 2, this gives you a full modern SharePoint structure for a 50-500 seat SMB without a single third-party license.

See also our introduction to SharePoint pages and web parts for deeper coverage of the individual web parts you can drop into hub navigation and landing pages.

Further Reading