A MODERN SITE

ARCHITECTURE

Joanne C Klein
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I am an independent SharePoint and Office 365

Consultant and owner of NexNovus Consulting.

I work with clients of all sizes and industry

verticals in both SharePoint On-premises and

Online. I help clients realize the benefits of

SharePoint and Office 365 by working with

them to build sustainable site and information

architectures and to leverage up-to-date

information management capabilities. This

provides a framework for building business

solutions for information workers and for

ultimately driving end-user adoption, something

I love to do!

I’m a Microsoft MVP in Office Servers & Services

and enjoy sharing knowledge via informal

training, mentoring, speaking, and blogging. I’m

self-motivated to learn new technologies and

tools and love that I chose I.T. as my career.

I’m an avid supporter of the SharePoint and

Office 365 communities at-large which has

allowed me to connect, grow, and learn from

many talented people around the globe.

Thanks to Valo for being a first-rate partner and

for their continued support thru the publication

of this eBook!

2
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE /03
Disclaimers /03
Definitions /03

INTRODUCTION /05

FLAT IS IN /07
What is a flat architecture and why is it better? /07

PROVISIONING /11
Deciding who can provision and why it matters /12
Practical governance for provisioning sites /13

MODERN INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE /15

The Information Architecture triangle /16

NAVIGATION /18
Navigating SharePoint sites in a modern, flat world /19

SEARCH /22
Finding what you need thru “search experiences” /23
The Office Graph – what is it and how does it help? /25

BRANDING ACROSS FLAT /27

FLAT IS FLEXIBLE /29

Making site structure changes /30
The SharePoint Hub: plug-and-play /31

STAYING COMPLIANT ACROSS FLAT /33

Retention Policies and Labels /22
Removing Content when you should /23

MODERN GOVERNANCE /36

Start with the end in mind /38
Give bite-size guidance /38
Make it easily accessible /38
Be open to change /39

HOW DO WE GET TO MODERN FLAT? /40

Moving from Classic to Modern /41
Moving from Deep to Flat /42

1
2
 PREFACE

Disclaimers

This eBook is covering SharePoint Online although some of the concepts can also
be applied to SharePoint on-premises versions.
Licensing considerations and options will not be covered.

Definitions

For clarity, here are terms used throughout this eBook as they relate to a modern
SharePoint site architecture:

Publishing site: any site provisioned where a controlled number of content authors publish

content for many viewers. Applies to both classic and modern sites.

Collaboration site: any site provisioned where most site users collaborate on content within it.

Applies to both classic and modern sites.

Subsite: a site with a parent site. Many subsites can exist within a site collection. A subsite can

also have subsites under it.

Office 365 Group: the security layer behind the collection of tools provisioned for a

collaboration space. It includes visitors, members, and owners. The tools provisioned will

depend on the preferred group experience. (Example: Outlook group, Yammer group, Microsoft

Teams site, Planner, etc.)

Classic site: a legacy site in SharePoint that displays a classic UI and does not have an Office 365

Group created with it. These sites have been in SharePoint for many years.
3
Modern Team site: a site collection optionally backed by an Office 365 Group. It has a modern

UI which includes modern pages and web parts. These are collaboration sites and, if backed

by an Office 365 Group, can consume other Office 365 services such as Teams, Planner, and

Outlook.

Communication site: a stand-alone site collection not backed by an Office 365 Group. It has a

modern UI which includes modern pages and web parts. Although you can collaborate on these,

the typical use-case is for modern publishing sites.

SharePoint Hub site: a site collection identified as a Hub which allows other site collections to

join to it. This will automatically share the Hub’s navigation, scope search, apply branding, and

roll-up news, activities, and events from all connected sites into the Hub.

Groupify: a term coined by Microsoft to mean the action of connecting an Office 365 Group to

an existing site collection.

Site column: how metadata is defined in SharePoint at a site level. A site column can be re-used

both in the site it’s defined in as well as any of its subsites.

Managed term sets: list of values that can be used across a tenant and often referred as a

corporate taxonomy. Good to use for consistent terms across site collections. Examples: fiscal

years, division names, department names.

Content type: a definition for a type of content. In SharePoint, the definition encapsulates the

metadata (defined by site columns), features and behavior of the content. SharePoint comes

with many out-of-the-box base content types (page, document, item, etc.), however custom

content types can be built on top of these.

Content Type Hub: a special site collection purpose-built to centrally house content types and

site columns with the purpose of publishing them to consuming site collections.

4
 INTRODUCTION

5
It’s a brave, new, modern, flat world in SharePoint. Whether your organization
is already there, on its way, or figuring out how to get there, it’s worthwhile
to stop and analyze what this means and why we’re here. We need to build
flexibility into our systems from the ground-up, so we can adapt to the fast
cadence of change experienced in Office 365. In a self-serve world, we need to
balance the collaboration needs of information workers in our organizations
against any regulatory requirements we need to be compliant with. We need
our environments to be resilient when dealing with change. An Office 365
environment must be designed with an eye to all these things, and a well-laid-
out SharePoint site architecture is one of the fundamental underpinnings of a
good and lasting design.

This eBook will cover many facets of building a modern, flat site architecture.

Flat architecture is modular, flexible, and built with the future in mind. This
eBook will demonstrate why designing SharePoint environments with a flat
site architecture is a proven technique to serve organizations well over time.
Many capabilities in Office 365 are reliant on a flat site structure as will be
demonstrated throughout this eBook.

6
FLAT IS IN

7
FLAT IS IN
What is a flat architecture and why is it better?
A flat architecture in SharePoint is one where every site provisioned is a separate site collection.
This model provides flexibility by allowing each site to operate independently from all others
which gives it a significant advantage. This is best demonstrated by contrasting it with a deep
architecture where subsites are provisioned instead of site collections.

Imagine a typical SharePoint site configuration for an organization with a division, department
and team structure. A deep architecture would be comprised of one divisional site collection
for each division and numerous subsites for each department within it. In addition, there would
be a subsite under each department site for each of its teams. (Figure 1) An important thing to
understand about a deep architecture is the role of inheritance. A subsite inherits, among other
things, permissions, navigation, branding, and features from its parent site. Although this can
sometimes be a desirable thing, it can cause problems if you’re inheriting things you don’t want.
Many SharePoint environments exist with subsites today. One of the compelling reasons why
organizations leveraged subsites in the past was the minimal permissions required to create
them (non-Administrator) and how quick and easy it was to provision them. If you wanted
to inherit settings from the parent site, but wanted a separate collaboration space, a subsite
seemed like a good choice. Although there may be times when a subsite is an acceptable

Figure 1 - Deep site architecture

8
solution for a given business scenario, it will not provide long-term flexibility and sustainability
for an overwhelming majority of cases.

Contrast this to a flat site architecture where all divisions, departments, and teams are each
provisioned as separate and distinct site collections and no dependency exists between them.
(Figure 2) Each site collection contains a root site where all content is stored. Under the covers, a
site collection is a boundary for these things making it independent of other site collections:

• Permissions

• Navigation

• Information Architecture

• Branding

• Search

• Retention

• Storage

Figure 2 - Flat site architecture

This is a key differentiator and significant advantage of a flat site architecture model as it makes
each site collection a discrete unit of work and, in doing so, very flexible. A practical example of
this: imagine there was an Accounting team in the Finance department dealing with sensitive
information and they didn’t want other teams in the Finance department to have access to it. To
accomplish this in a deep architecture, you would stop inheriting permission from the parent
Finance department site and create unique permissions for the Accounting team site. Although
this is certainly possible, done at scale these types of one-off changes across an organization’s
9
entire SharePoint environment can cause support issues over the long-run. To accomplish
this in a flat architecture, you would simply set the required permissions on the root site of
the Accounting Team site collection since it is independent of the Finance Department site’s
permission settings.

Throughout the remainder of this eBook, each topic will demonstrate advantages of a flat site
architecture and why this is the preferred model for long-term sustainability and growth.

 IN LARGE ENVIRONMENTS, BE AWARE OF THESE LIMITS:

- Threshold limit of 2000 subsites per site collection
- Limit of 500,000 site collections per tenant (not including OneDrive for Business)

Note: for the remainder of this eBook, the word ‘site’ will be used to mean site collection, not subsite.

10
 PROVISIONING Once you’ve bought into
the flat model where
everything is its own site,
it’s time to decide who
will have permission
in your organization to
provision one. This is a
really important decision
an organization must
make from an end-user,
governance, and technical
perspective. It’s striking
an acceptable balance
between satisfying the
needs of information
workers’ collaboration
demands in your
organization against
ensuring the appropriate
controls and governance
are in place for all sites
provisioned.

11
PROVISIONING
Deciding who can provision and why it matters
Once you’ve bought into the flat model where everything is its own site, it’s time to decide who
will have permission in your organization to provision one. This is a really important decision an
organization must make from an end-user, governance, and technical perspective. It’s striking an
acceptable balance between satisfying the needs of information workers’ collaboration demands
in your organization against ensuring the appropriate controls and governance are in place
for all sites provisioned. Although having effective governance in a SharePoint environment
is always beneficial, the more regulated an organization is, usually the more controls and
governance required. How well an organization is set up to implement and automate these
controls will determine how successful they’ll be at allowing end-users to provision their own
sites and to operate in an environment with many of them provisioned.

In Office 365, there are numerous ways to create a SharePoint site thru the UI, most are backed
by an Office 365 Group (*) as the membership layer/security construct.
All are referred to as Modern:
• Communication site
• Modern team site *
• Microsoft Teams site *
• Outlook Group *
• Planner *
• Yammer Group *

A Classic SharePoint site(collection) can be provisioned in the SharePoint Admin Center by a

Global Admin or SharePoint Service Admin. Provisioning this type of site is not controlled by the
same security group as modern sites (described below).

You can limit who can create a modern site to a specific security group to control site sprawl
across your organization, however, before doing so, ensure there is a streamlined process in
place (manual or automated) for end-users to request a new site. What is an acceptable amount
of time for end-users to wait for a new site in your organization? Is it minutes (likely)? Hours?

12
Days? Weeks? You need to know what this time frame is and ensure your process delivers within
it. Also, the shorter the time frame, the more likely automation will be required to meet it.

If instead, you’ve decided to open the floodgates and allow end-users to provision their own
sites, this is fantastic news for the end-user! They’ll be blown away by the power, control, and
freedom this gives them. This can, however, come at a steep cost in terms of organizational loss
of control and increased risk if not planned appropriately. For this reason, governance is an
important part of the provisioning process.

Practical governance for provisioning sites

Whether you’re allowing end-users to provision their own sites or limiting that capability to a
security group, you’ll want to consider putting some practical governance and technical controls
in place before provisioning any kind of site. If end-users are provisioning their own sites, some
of these would have to be automated.

To get you started, here are some questions your team should have answers for to mitigate
security and compliance risk and to set end-users up for success on their site. If you can answer
yes to these questions, you’re well positioned for a flexible, maintainable, compliant, modern
site architecture:

• Is a process in place to ensure duplicate sites aren’t being created? For example, what will
prevent 2 different people from creating a “Marketing Events” site, named slightly different
if each doesn’t know the other exists?
• Are you controlling the group name, and do you have a naming standard in place? (refer to
the Office 365 Groups naming policy to enforce a standardized, consistent naming
convention for group names)

• Is guidance in place to assist end-users in deciding what type of site to request in the first
place? (Microsoft Teams, Modern Team site, Communication site, Groupified Yammer)

• Is guidance in place for site owners once they get their new site? For example, how should
they administer permissions on their site? Site owners are in control of who’s allowed
in and the permissions granted within - they need to understand this important
responsibility particularly if you’ve allowed external sharing for the site

13
• Are security, protection, and retention controls in place for how end-users should handle
the information on their site? i.e. will you allow sensitive information to be stored there?
Are there retention requirements for information generated on the site? Do you have a site
closure/group expiration process in place?

Note: to assist in determining the security, protection and retention controls required for new sites,
define group classifications in your tenant and leverage them. For example, if a group-backed site is
classified as ‘Confidential’, set a site Retention policy to retain all content for 5 years and possibly an
Azure Information Protection label scoped to site members to protect their documents and emails.

Productizing your offering

Giving power to your users regarding provisioning of new Modern Team sites is a great thing,
but as an organization, you can push this further by offering pre-packaged templates (in
Microsoft terms, those are called Site Designs) of both Modern Team and Communication sites
that can be selected by users at creation time. Those Site Designs are a collection of artifacts
(column, content types, lists, etc.) and execution of actions (assigning a site theme, joining a hub,
etc.). Taking this approach will offer standard foundations for all your Modern sites and will offer
a more streamlined experience for your users.

14
 MODERN INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE A well planned-out
SharePoint Information
Architecture (IA) provides
the backbone of your
SharePoint environment
and helps create a
maintainable, intuitive,
and usable system
widely adopted by users.
Information Architecture
is a discipline that
covers many things: site
structure, library and
list structure, metadata,
corporate taxonomy,
navigation, and search.
It’s important to work
with key content owners
in each site early in the
provisioning process to
understand how they
will interact with their
content.

15
 

MODERN INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

A well planned-out SharePoint Information Architecture (IA) provides the backbone of your
SharePoint environment and helps create a maintainable, intuitive, and usable system widely
adopted by users. Information Architecture is a discipline that covers many things: site structure,
library and list structure, metadata, corporate taxonomy, navigation, and search. It’s important
to work with key content owners in each site early in the provisioning process to understand
how they will interact with their content. What are the components we should focus on in a
modern, flat site architecture and does it depend on the type of site we’ve provisioned for users?
I believe it does and I’ll use the Information Architecture triangle to demonstrate this.

The Information Architecture triangle

I’ve identified 5 zones in the IA triangle below illustrating the need for SharePoint Information
Architecture as you move through them. To be clear, all sites in zones 1 thru 5 are site collections
(remember… flat!) and the amount of Information Architecture applied to each one will vary
depending on the amount of structure and governance required within. The further you move
up the triangle, generally, the more Information Architecture required.
The triangle also shows where modern sites fit into each horizontal zone along the right side.
Zone 5 is end-users’ OneDrive for Business sites where little to no Information Architecture
typically exists. Zones 3 and 4 are collaborative sites where Office 365 Group sites are
provisioned. The amount of information architecture in those zones will vary depending on the
team and workload. Sites in zones 1 and 2 typically require a significant amount of Information
Architecture as it is more controlled content with a large viewing audience.

16
 Figure 3 - Information Architecture Triangle

Once you have your site provisioned from one of the 5 zones above, you need to decide how
much IA is required to structure your content. Here are some guidelines to follow:

• Managed Term Sets defined at the tenant level can be consumed by multiple site
collections, making them particularly beneficial in a flat site architecture, so make sure
you’re taking advantage of them. These define your corporate taxonomy and are
an excellent option for multi-value columns. Examples of term sets are Fiscal Years,
Divisions, Regions, Departments, Sales Areas, etc.

• Create Content Types at the site collection level. If you have a need to share Content
Types across site collections, the traditional way has been to leverage the Content Type
Hub. Now, you can use Site Script actions with your Site Designs to automatically create
Content Types at time of site creation.

• Create Site Columns at the site collection level. It costs nothing extra to use site columns
instead of list columns and it buys you reusability. This allows you to create once and use
many times across lists and libraries on a site. Like Content Types, if you have a need to
share site columns across site collections, these can be provisioned via Site Script actions
at the time of site creation.
Two important IA components critical to the success of any SharePoint environment: navigation
and search, are covered in the following two sections.
17
As good as a flat site
NAVIGATION
architecture is, we still need
to be able to quickly get
to the one site we want.
How will we do this if all
sites we’re a member of
aren’t presented to us in
one concise navigation
hierarchy? To answer this,
let’s separate SharePoint
navigation into two
buckets: controlled and
collaborative.

18
NAVIGATION
Navigating SharePoint sites in a modern, flat world
A modern, flat, and therefore wide SharePoint site architecture means most of us will potentially
have a lot of site collections we’ll use across our Office 365 tenant. As good as a flat site
architecture is, we still need to be able to quickly get to the one site we want. How will we do
this if all sites we’re a member of aren’t presented to us in one concise navigation hierarchy? To
answer this, let’s separate SharePoint navigation into two buckets: controlled and collaborative.
The type of site will dictate, in part, how you’ll navigate to it. Office 365 provides numerous
navigation options for each type to help end-users find the site they’re looking for.

Navigation is part of your overall SharePoint Information Architecture. How you lay out the sites
and the navigation to get to them can have a big productivity impact on end-users.
Plan carefully!

Controlled Navigation
For corporate-wide sites, where all end-users across the organization have access, there are
several ways for end-users to navigate them:

• Administrators can add key sites to a Featured Links section on the SharePoint app
home page. Examples of links you may find here are for corporate divisional sites,
an Office 365 training & adoption site, or a project site portal.

• Administrators can build a consistent global navigation across site collections to provide
a virtual hierarchy to end-users. This is how you can logically group and organize a flat
structure into something that will appear hierarchically-structured to an end-user.
Depending if you’re on a classic or modern site, you can configure the global
navigation across the top of your site by manually editing it, leveraging
managed navigation, or building a custom navigation solution.

• The SharePoint Hub is a new feature released to automatically build a cross-site

navigation. With the Hub, several SharePoint sites can be virtually “grouped” together
under one Hub site creating a virtual hierarchy on the SharePoint Hub. More about
the Hub later in this eBook!

19
An advantage of a flat SharePoint site architecture with respect to navigation is the plug-and-
play behavior it provides. If a site moves from one virtual hierarchy to another, an update to
navigation is all that’s required.

Collaborative Navigation
What about navigation for your collaborative sites that aren’t part of either a standard Global
navigation or a SharePoint Hub? This type of navigation is more fluid in nature and, in some
cases, requires an end-user to self-serve to tailor it to their preferences.

Imagine you’re a member of several project sites and community sites and at any point in time,
each of these sites may have content you’re actively working on. You’ll need a way to quickly get
back to them and Office 365 provides several ways to do this, some of which are:

• Follow sites (Groups) of interest so they appear in the Following section of the SharePoint app

• Find frequently visited sites in the SharePoint app

• Find your Office 365 Group sites (exception is Microsoft Team sites) listed in Outlook’s
navigation under the Groups section

• Find your Microsoft Teams’ sites listed in the Teams section of the Microsoft Teams app

• Ask yourself if you need to navigate to the site at all OR if you just want to get back to the
document you were previously working on. If this is the case, navigate to the Documents
section of the Office 365 app launcher to get a list of those (image). You can also Pin
documents for quick access later. This eliminates the need to directly navigate to
the SharePoint site at all!

Figure 4 – App launcher Documents section

20
The self-serve nature of navigating collaborative sites can be a challenge for many end-users,
however it’s a necessary skill in a flat site architecture. Hub what you can and self-serve the rest!

21
Search is a fundamental SEARCH
component of any SharePoint
environment and as the content
you’re working on becomes
spread across an increasing
number of sites in a flat
architecture, it becomes even
more important for search to be
able to deliver relevant results
to you.

22
 

SEARCH
Finding what you need thru “search experiences”
Search is a fundamental component of any SharePoint environment and as the content you’re
working on becomes spread across an increasing number of sites in a flat architecture, it
becomes even more important for search to be able to deliver relevant results to you.

2 important things to know about search:

• results are always permission-trimmed ensuring you only see results you have permission to see

• results are ordered by what’s likely to be relevant to you based on the Office Graph

Search web parts

A common way of using search in SharePoint is to deliver content via search web parts. These web
parts are commonly found in sites with a well-defined Information Architecture (IA) when you need
to control what’s being displayed to the end-user. The magic of search web parts lies in how you’ve
laid out your sites’ IA. A search web part can leverage site columns (metadata) and content types to
display content on a page based on the type of content it is and/or metadata on it.

Example 1: Define a site column called Project name that refers to a managed term set of all
projects in your organization. Add this site column to a custom document content type called
Project document. As project documents are added across your tenant, they can be tagged with
the project they’re for. A search web part could leverage the Project name site column to display
all documents for a specific project on a page.

Example 2: Define a site column called Page type that refers to a list of the different types of
pages you will create on a site (Policy, Procedure, Checklist, etc.). Add this site column to a site
pages content type and tag all policy pages with a Page type of ‘Policy’. A search web part placed
on a page could leverage the Page type site column to display all pages tagged with ‘Policy’.

23
Note: the modern version of a search web part to display content on a modern page is the Highlighted
Content web part.

Another way of finding content is if you explicitly set out to find something in your environment
using search. To best demonstrate how SharePoint does this, let’s distinguish 3 different ways an
end-user will find things:

1. You know something exists and you know where it is

2. You know something exists, but you don’t know where it is

3. You don’t know something exists, but you could benefit from knowing about it

Let’s show how search helps across these 3 ways:

Figure 5 - Search box is contextual

You know something exists and you know where it is

If you know the site or library where a file exists, you can browse to either the homepage of
the site or the document library (circled below) and enter the name, partial name, or metadata
of the file in the search box on the top left of the SharePoint site. This search box is contextual
24
which means if you’re on the homepage of the site, a search will return results scoped to the
current site. If you’re on the Documents library page, a search will return results scoped to the
document library.

You know something exists, but you don’t know where it is

If you know a file exists (and you have permission to see it), but you have no idea what site it’s on,
you can browse to the SharePoint App in the App launcher to start your search. Enter the name,
partial name, or metadata of the file in the search box on the top left of the app. This search box
will return results (Sites, Files, People, News) scoped to all site collections across your tenant.

Figure 6 - Search across all sites

You don’t know something exists, but you could benefit from knowing about it
I believe this is a key differentiator in Modern search and particularly important with the
proliferation of sites across a flat site architecture. If you don’t know something exists, how can
you explicitly search for it or find out about it? Modern search experiences are starting to appear
across your Office 365 tenant to proactively discover relevant content for you by leveraging
signals in the Office Graph. As the volume of sites increases, this style of search is critical to
proactively bring content to you.

The Office Graph – what is it and how does it help?

The Office Graph is continually collecting and analyzing signals from users’ interactions across
your tenant. Signals include activities like viewing a document, modifying a document, email
communication with a colleague, etc. The results of these signals are used to determine what
will likely be relevant to you. Examples of apps that leverage the Office Graph are Delve (shows
25
Popular documents, What colleagues are working on, and Documents from people around
you) and OneDrive’s Discover link (shows documents trending around me). Both apps deliver
personalized content without requiring you to explicitly search for it. Search on steroids!
 

26
 BRANDING ACROSS FLAT In the past, we’ve been doing
extensive branding work on
Classic Publishing Sites to give our
Intranets a strong visual identity
that matches our brand. Today,
we tend to limit the branding to
what the platform can offer out of
the box to ease the evolution of
this everchanging platform and to
blend gracefully with all the other
tools.

15:49

27
BRANDING ACROSS FLAT
Flat does not mean boring
Even though Information Architecture is all about structuring your content, branding your sites
should not be overlooked. Branding is important to streamline the look & feel your users will
experience throughout their interaction with your environment. Modern branding capabilities
are simple yet powerful solution to give a visual guideline to your users.

In the past, we’ve been doing extensive branding work on Classic Publishing Sites to give our
Intranets a strong visual identity that matches our brand. Today, we tend to limit the branding
to what the platform can offer out of the box to ease the evolution of this everchanging platform
and to blend gracefully with all the other tools.

Out of the box, Microsoft offers a set of themes for your site to easily allow non-technical
business users to brand it with the colors they want. You want to push this further because
those colors are not matching your brand colors? It is also possible to create your own theme
where you can define standard colors, accent colors, background colors, etc. Once you create
one, or more custom themes, your IT department can push those themes to a corporate theme
catalog, which will make them accessible across your Office 365 tenant. Site Owners will then
be able to choose those company-approved themes whenever they want to apply a new look to
their sites. If needed, your IT department can also disable the Out of the Box options in order to
ensure that every site respects your visual identity and branding guidelines.

You can also define a site logo as part of your branding strategy. If this site is a Modern Team
site, this image will be shared across all tools in Office 365 (SharePoint, Outlook, Planner, Teams,
etc.)

28
One of the most important FLAT IS FLEXIBLE
benefits of a flat, modern
site architecture is
flexibility. Using two
common examples, I’ll
demonstrate how flexible
and easy a flat architecture
is when dealing with
structural change in an
organization.

29
FLAT IS FLEXIBLE
Making site structure changes
One of the most important benefits of a flat, modern site architecture is flexibility. Using two
common examples, I’ll demonstrate how flexible and easy a flat architecture is when dealing
with structural change in an organization.

The first example is a company re-organization, something most of us have experienced at one
point or another. Imagine you have a large organization with hundreds of site collections and a
number of those site collections are for department and team sites. What happens when one
of those teams moves from one department to another in a flat site architecture? (image) By
treating each site as a discrete unit of work we can independently move the team site to its new
location. By ‘move’, I really mean updating the navigation, creating the illusion to end-users the
site has moved since this is how you create a virtual hierarchy in a flat architecture. In the image,
Team B will now appear in Department B’s navigation instead of Department A’s.

Figure 7 - Team B moving from Department A to B

The second example is bringing together similar-themed sites across your environment in an
agile way. Imagine you have a Human Resource Center where employees go to for employee-
related information in your organization. Here’s an example of different sites that could be

30
added to the HR Resource Center:

• HR Policies and Benefits

• Expense Claims
• New Employees
• Retiring Employees
• Recognition and Rewards
• Travel

Imagine we decide to grow the stand-alone Travel site into its own Travel Center so we could
include other existing travel-related sites with it such as:

• Travel Insurance
• Travel Requests
• Travel Programs
• Car Rentals
• Preferred Vendors

This change could easily be done by updating the navigation on the Travel site to include links to
all travel-related sites.

The SharePoint Hub: plug-and-play

Although the above changes could be accomplished by updating navigation, the new SharePoint
Hub functionality makes the change an even better experience. The SharePoint Hub provides a
way of grouping sites together to form a virtual hierarchy and is a feature purpose-built for flat
site architectures!

Using our previous examples, you could identify all Department, HR Resource Center and
Travel Center sites each as individual SharePoint Hubs. Once identified as a Hub, other sites can
connect to it and become part of the Hub. This will automatically include all connected sites in
the Hub’s navigation, scope search and branding to all sites hubbed together, and roll-up news
and activities from across all connected sites. It will even keep the connected sites’ original URLs

31
in-tact. Brilliant! A key factor of SharePoint Hubs’ success is having a flat site architecture for it to
work with, so make sure you have one!

In today’s dynamic workplace, the “plug and play” model of the SharePoint Hub makes it very
easy to react to site structure changes over time making this a powerful addition to SharePoint.

Note: in the example above, a Hub cannot be part of another Hub, so you would have to manually
include a navigation link to the new Travel Center Hub from the Human Resource Center Hub.

Using your Hub to normalize your brand

Earlier in this eBook, we have learned how to create a corporate strategy for the visual identity
of our sites, but how does this work in a scenario where we now have individual sites, and Hub
Sites? Once you select a theme, and logo for your Hub Site, all the sites you will link to that Hub
Site will automatically inherit the same theme, and logo from the Hub Site. This will ensure that
users will be able to easily identify which Hub they are in, across all the work units of that Hub.

32
In a flat, modern site STAYING COMPLIANT ACROSS FLAT
architecture, an organization
will end up with a lot of
sites over time. We need to
implement data governance
at scale across all sites to
ensure content is being
retained for as long as it
should and deleted as soon
as it should.

33
Staying compliant across Flat
In a flat, modern site architecture, an organization will end up with a lot of sites over time. We
need to implement data governance at scale across all sites to ensure content is being retained for
as long as it should and deleted as soon as it should. This problem is tackled on several fronts:

Retention Policies and Labels

Retention policies and labels are the new way of applying retention across Office 365 workloads
(not just SharePoint). Policies can be published at a global level to many workloads across your
tenant: Exchange email boxes, SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, Office 365 groups, Skype for
Business accounts, Exchange public folders, and now Microsoft Teams channel messages and
chats (Figure 8). Based on your organization’s retention requirements, you can publish your own
retention policies to any or all locations across your tenant.

Figure 8 - Publish Retention Policies to workload locations

If you have retention needs for specific types of content (Contracts, Budgets, Tax records, etc.),
an Office 365 retention label can be created for it and published to the required location(s).
Note: for SharePoint sites, a Retention Policy and label can only be published to a site collection
level and not a subsite level. This is yet another reason to stay flat with your site architecture.

Removing Content when you should

An important part of data governance is disposing of content as soon as it should be. Retention
policies and labels can dispose of content automatically when the retention period has been
met. That will take care of the content itself, but what about the actual site? For good site
governance, we need to be able to delete sites when they’re no longer required.

34
For any group-backed site, a Group Expiration policy can be configured to notify group owners
when their site is coming up for renewal at which time they can make the decision whether to
delete it or not. For non-group-backed sites, a combination of retention policies for the data and
site policies for the site should be put in place.

These are helpful features both from a compliance and governance perspective. From a
compliance perspective, we don’t want to retain content longer than we should and from a
governance perspective, we want to keep our tenant clean and only have sites within it that are
providing business value.

Engage the information management team in your organization to plan out how you will remain
compliant with the organization’s regulatory requirements. This will drive the controls you need
to have in place to meet them.

35
MODERN GOVERNANCE Whether we’re talking about
governance from a decade ago
or last week, it’s still KING in
the SharePoint world. I would
argue perhaps it’s even more
important as organizations are
assigning site ownership to
information workers across their
organization and don’t centrally
control many aspects they
perhaps once did.

36
Modern Governance
Whether we’re talking about governance from a decade ago or last week, it’s still KING in the
SharePoint world. I would argue perhaps it’s even more important as organizations are assigning
site ownership to information workers across their organization and don’t centrally control
many aspects they perhaps once did. In the same way SharePoint has had a modern facelift
in recent years, Governance is going thru a similar metamorphosis, particularly with the many
touchpoints SharePoint has with other apps and services across Office 365. Enter modern
SharePoint Governance!

Building a governance plan for SharePoint cannot be done in isolation as it is now part of
the bigger Office 365 ecosystem. Consider Teams’ chats and channel messages, Outlook
conversations, and Planner tasks being close-at-hand in many sites provisioned today. Is there
a place for governance across these collaboration features? It will require a deft touch to put a
framework of guidance around collaboration tools while still retaining the benefits they provide.
Start by focusing on the things you need to control in your environment.

My best advice for building sustainable governance in your organization’s Office 365
environment is to take a pragmatic approach. There is absolutely no value in building an overly-
complicated governance plan if it can’t be adhered to over the long-run. According to Merriam-
Webster (Webster, n.d.), guidance is “the process of controlling the course of a projectile by a
built-in mechanism”. You could argue putting the power of a full SharePoint site and related
apps and services (Planner, Outlook, Chat, etc.) in the hands of an information worker is a type
of technology projectile, so it is incumbent upon us to provide some rules of the road to guide
them in the right direction. Governance is what helps us do this.

Good governance is not only about planning and configuring your environment, but also about
defining and communicating the guidelines and rules to sustain it. Governance will cover things
that should be strictly adhered to (rules) as well as recommendations and guidelines to follow.
There is no one-size-fits-all, prescriptive recipe when it comes to achieving effective governance
in your organization which is likely one of the reasons why it’s hard to attain. However, here are
some recommendations for building one that can work for a modern site architecture and has a
very good chance of surviving over the long-run:
37
Start with the end in mind
How do you want your environment to look, function, and behave when everyone is actively
using it? This will help kickstart ideas for defining the rules and guidelines you should have in
place. Examples:

• if you want consistently formatted news items published weekly from each one of your
organization’s teams, put that in your governance plan and include it as part of a team’s
site agreement (and training!)

• if you want everyone to label their documents in Office 365 to apply protection and
retention controls, ensure label recommendations are configured and end-users
are trained on how to apply a label and how to override the recommendation if necessary

Give bite-size guidance

Don’t build a 50-page document and think information workers are going to read it. Break it up
into easily-consumable chunks that are organized by topic around the rules and guidelines you
came up with from the previous step.

Make it easily accessible

Make it easy for information workers to find/discover your guidance! A great idea is to use
modern pages on a Communication site to showcase your governance plan and to organize
pages based on topic. Ideas:
• Rules for site owners
• Building a great news page
• Handling sensitive data in Office 365

This makes it very easy to change and adapt over time (see next point) You can make this part
of your overall Office 365 Training & Adoption site. Also, if you have rules you want site owners
to follow, make them easily accessible by linking to a “Rules for Site Owners” page right on the
home page of every site. Whichever way you choose to deliver your guidance, the goal is to
make it easy for information workers to find and ultimately succeed using the product.

38
Be open to change
The only way a set of governance guidelines and rules can work over the long haul is if they can
adapt and change as the product and the organization’s use of it changes. This is particularly
true with the cadence of change in Office 365. There may be times when you need to adjust
a guideline on something once it’s tested in the “real world”. This is completely ok since first
and foremost, it must work for your organization. Don’t make it an inflexible set of rules that
handcuffs your organization’s ability to be creative, agile, and productive. Instead, aim for
relevant rules and guidance adaptable to change.

That’s pragmatic. That’s modern SharePoint Governance.

 

39
 HOW DO WE GET TO MODERN FLAT? If you have an existing
SharePoint environment not
currently following the flat,
modern site architecture
model but you would like
to get there, how can you
do this? Let’s tackle this
problem on two fronts: the
first is how to move from
classic to modern sites and
the second is how to move
from a deep to a flat site
structure. Depending on
your current environment,
you may need to do either
one or both.

40
How do we get to Modern Flat?
If you have an existing SharePoint environment not currently following the flat, modern site
architecture model but you would like to get there, how can you do this? Let’s tackle this
problem on two fronts: the first is how to move from classic to modern sites and the second is
how to move from a deep to a flat site structure. Depending on your current environment, you
may need to do either one or both.

Moving from Classic to Modern

Do you already have a flat site architecture, but comprised of classic sites? Even though
Microsoft has stated, “The classic experience is not being deprecated; both classic and modern
will coexist.”, you may want to modernize some/all of them to take advantage of the new
modern User Interface (UI). The technique you use for each site will depend on its type.

For classic collaboration sites, Microsoft has coined the term groupify to allow you to modernize
them. Groupifying a site will connect it to a new Office 365 Group and will enable you to
integrate other group-connected tools with it such as Planner, a Microsoft Team, Outlook
conversations, etc. This will also automatically create a new, modern home page for your site.
Groupifying can be done either thru the UI or programmatically with PowerShell.

For classic publishing sites where you don’t require an Office 365 Group to back it, there
is currently no one-to-one, one-size-fits-all upgrade path to modernize them. Once classic
publishing features are enabled on a site, it’s not currently supported to build modern pages
on it. Due to this, you should move to modern by provisioning a new Communication site and
triaging your existing classic pages (wiki and web part pages) to determine which ones you want
to be modernized and added to your new site. Consider this an opportunity to re-evaluate your
classic site’s pages, their usage, and their layout with an eye to only replacing them with new
modern pages when it’s warranted. Transforming your site pages can be done either manually
or programmatically.

Refer to this Microsoft link for details on groupifying a site: Connect to an Office 365 Group
Refer to this Patterns & Practises scanning tool to provide an analysis of your site’s readiness
for connecting to an Office 365 Group as well as transforming your classic site pages, lists and

41
libraries into the modern UI experience: SharePoint Modernization scanner

Moving from Deep to Flat

To be clear, there is no way to automatically convert a subsite into a site collection and move
from deep to flat. Also, you likely won’t be able to move all sites at once, particularly if your
environment is actively being used. However, with minimal disruption to the business, you can
move into a flat model in a controlled, methodical way:

• Identify all sites in your current architecture (site collections and subsites)

• Decide if each of those sites is still required, can be combined, etc. This is a great time to
do some housecleaning in your current environment and remove anything no longer required

• Understand what your navigation requirements will be for staff to get to their new site
when you’re done. Remember, navigation will no longer be automatically created
for you based on your site structure (apart from the new SharePoint Hub) so this needs to
be maintained in other ways

• To ensure minimal disruption to the business, decide the order in which to move the sites.
For example, don’t move the Finance department sites in the middle of budget or tax
season. Also, start from the bottom-up on your current site hierarchy so you move
all dependent sites before moving a parent site

• For each site:

o Provision a new site collection (many kinds to choose from!) Remember, you
can groupify an existing site collection, but not a subsite.

o Migrate the content (and structure if they had any custom Information
Architecture in their old site) from the old site into the new site collection.
Remember to bring over version history and document metadata (Created,
Created by, Modified, Modified by) from the old site. A migration tool
can assist with this effort

o Each site collection will have its own permission settings. This is an
opportunity to start fresh with site permissions rather than bringing
the permission setup from the old site.

42
 o Modernize your branding

o Update the navigation on the old parent site to point to the new site
collection for the migrated site

o Delete the old site

• When complete, all sites will be in their own site collection and navigation will reflect your
new structure.

You’re now in a modern, flat site architecture! It’s a good place to be.

43
 15 Reasons to love Find your
Valo Intranet Valo Intranet
reselling
1. The best intranet partner
2. It’s just simple
3. Boosts user adoption We have Valo Partners
around the world.
4. Works with every device
5. Your company’s look & feel
6. All features you need FIND YOUR PARTNER

7. Fast to deploy
8. Affordable pricing Want to become a partner instead?
9. In your own language
10. Stays evergreen
11. We love feedback
12. Technically strong
13. Be in safe hands
14. Experience matters
15. Feeling good
Best Intranet/Extranet

Award Winner
European SharePoint and
READ THE STORY HERE OUR AWARDS

44
Join over 1,000,000 happy users!

45
 Fall in with
your intranet

A ready-to-go social intranet 100% mobile optimized

Always updated and technically strong People and sharing

Book a demo

valointranet.com Follow us @valointranet