A partner at a 40-person consulting firm needs last year’s report for a client. She knows it’s in SharePoint. She opens SharePoint and gets a page of recent files that isn’t hers. She tries search. Nothing useful. She can’t find the client’s site, let alone the Documents library inside it.
She emails IT. IT has heard this before.
A year ago IT did the careful thing. Every client got its own SharePoint site, and access to each one is locked to the people on that project. Then the complaints started. So IT pushed OneDrive shortcuts to every client library with a PowerShell script. That made it worse. Staff now had to work out whether a file lived in OneDrive or SharePoint, and the Mac users gave up and went back to the browser.
Shortcuts do help the few people who work in one or two client libraries all day. For everyone else, the site-per-client setup is sound. What it lacks is a front door.
The real problem is navigation, not permissions
When senior staff can’t find a client folder, the usual guess is permissions. Leave them alone. The partner can open every site she’s on. She just has no way to see them all in one place.
In modern SharePoint, every site is a peer. Nothing links one client site to the next, so there’s no menu that lists them and no search box that spans them. Microsoft’s planning guidance calls hub sites the “connective tissue” for families of sites. That’s the missing piece.
Don’t fix it by merging clients into one big site. Microsoft says Copilot “only surfaces organizational data to which individual users have at least view permissions.” Small sites with tight teams keep each person’s Copilot answers inside their own clients.
What a hub changes, and what it leaves alone
A hub site is an ordinary site that you register as a hub. Other sites then associate with it.
| Changes when a client site joins the hub? | |
|---|---|
| Navigation bar across the top | Yes. The hub’s menu appears on every associated site. |
| Theme and colours | Yes. Associated sites take the hub’s theme. |
| Search from the hub | Yes. It covers the hub and every associated site. |
| Who can open the client site | No. Nothing about access changes. |
| Who owns the client site | No. Owners stay owners. |
Microsoft is direct about the last two rows. Association “does not change the permissions on a site,” and anything the hub shows is security trimmed: “if you don’t have access to the content, you won’t see it.”
One hub, many client sites
The hub sits on top of the client sites. Each site keeps its own team and its own lock. Checked in October 2026 against Microsoft Learn.
Step 1: create the hub site
Create a new communication site and call it something plain, like Clients. Give your staff group read access to this site only. That opens the front door without opening any client site.
Step 2: register it as a hub
You need the SharePoint Administrator role or higher. Microsoft’s documented path: in the SharePoint admin center, open Active sites, select your new site, choose Hub, then Register as hub site.
The panel asks who can associate sites with the hub. Fill this in with your IT admins. If you leave it empty, Microsoft warns, any user can associate their site with the hub.
Changes can take 2 to 4 hours to appear.
Step 3: associate every client site
The same Hub menu on Active sites associates a selected site with a hub. That’s fine for five clients. For thirty, run one line of PowerShell per client:
Add-SPOHubSiteAssociation https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/ClientBirch -HubSite https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/ClientsAdd this line to your new-client checklist, right after you create the site. Tell each project team before you start, because the new menu bar surprises people.
Step 4: search from the hub
There’s nothing to switch on. Once a client site is associated, search on the hub’s home page covers it. Teach people one habit: start your search on the hub.
One side effect: a client site’s own search box now searches the hub too. That’s still only files the person can open. If you’d rather keep each site’s box to itself, here’s the one-line fix.
Step 5: add a Sites web part so people can browse
Some people won’t search. Edit the hub’s home page, add the Sites web part, and set it to All sites in the hub. Each person sees only the client sites they can open.
Use this list for clients, not the hub menu. A menu link shows to everyone, so every staff member would see every client’s name.
The web part shows up to 99 sites. Past that, split by practice area, with one web part each using Select sites.
Same hub, different results
The hub doesn't widen anyone's access. Each person's search and Sites list match the client sites they could already open. Checked in October 2026 against Microsoft Learn.
What this does not fix
- Wrong permissions. If a client site is shared with the whole company, the hub shows it to the whole company. Check each site’s access before you associate it.
- Hub permission sync. The hub can sync its visitors onto associated sites. On a client hub, that would give hub readers access to every client. Leave it off.
- More than one hub. A client site can belong to one hub only. If you’ll want practice-area hubs later, decide that now.
The bottom line
Keep one site per client. Add one hub, associate every client site to it, and put a Sites web part on its home page. People get one place to start, and nobody gets access they didn’t already have.