Site templates and the role of hubs

We’ve looked at Team Sites and Communication Sites as modern templates for building new sites in SharePoint Online. Each site is something of an island unto itself. People create content for themselves and store it in places they have access to – let’s say one giant treasure chest. Sometimes, several groups of people work together in such a way that they need to start putting boxes, dividers, and containers within that chest and only hand out keys to the people who really need access to each part. We’re building what was traditionally referred to as a site collection.

This older title makes sense in a world where a site collection served as a boundary for gathering multiple subsites together into a single container. For example, a Human Resources (HR) site collection may have had a benefits subsite, a policies subsite, a subsite for managers to coordinate, and so forth. The subsites could either inherit the permissions...