Good SharePoint guidance starts with structure, permissions, and ownership. If you plan how your SharePoint site, hub site, and team site permissions work before building content, you reduce risk, improve access, and avoid painful clean-ups later. This guide summarises best practice covered in our latest Labyrinth Technology video and explains why watching the full walkthrough matters.
SharePoint is the leading intranet platform in the world, but that does not mean it is simple. SharePoint Online gives you huge flexibility, which is both its strength and its biggest risk.
Without clear SharePoint guidance, organisations end up with too many sites in SharePoint, inconsistent access, and site owners who do not fully understand the impact of their decisions. Over time, this leads to restricted access issues, accidental data exposure, and an intranet that employees stop trusting.
The goal of SharePoint is to support day to day work. When the structure is wrong, it does the opposite. Good guidance helps you create a SharePoint intranet that stays secure, usable, and easy to manage as your organisation grows.
One of the most important decisions is how you structure your sites. Modern SharePoint works best with a flat structure. That means avoiding subsites and instead using multiple sites connected through hub sites.
You will typically have different types of sites. A communication site might be used for your intranet homepage or internal communications. A SharePoint team site supports collaboration for a given department or project. Project sites allow teams to work together without exposing information to the entire organisation.
Each site should have a clear purpose and defined site owners. This reduces confusion and helps ensure consistency across your SharePoint environment.
A SharePoint hub site acts as a central hub that connects related sites. This might be a central hub for your intranet, a regional hub, or a hub for a specific business function.
When you create hub sites, you register an existing site as a hub and then associate other sites with it. These associated sites inherit the hub site theme, hub logo, and navigation, which helps ensure consistency across the entire hub.
Crucially, sites associated with a hub site do not inherit permissions by default. This is a key security feature and one of the main reasons hub sites are preferred over older subsite structures.
Only the hub site owner can manage hub navigation. This prevents uncontrolled changes and helps keep navigation links clear and relevant.
Technically, you can create up to 2,000 hub sites in a tenant, so hub site limits are rarely a practical concern. The real challenge is deciding how many hub sites you actually need.
Most organisations work best with a single hub for their main intranet, supported by additional hubs only where there is a clear need, such as regional hubs or large divisions. Creating too many hubs can fragment navigation and reduce hub usage.
The aim is clarity. A small number of well-defined hubs is easier for users to understand and easier for IT to manage.
A SharePoint intranet homepage should act as a central hub for information, not a dumping ground for content. It doesn’t matter if you are using a communication site or a home site, the homepage should give users quick access to what they need most.
Modern SharePoint intranet design often includes news web parts, events web parts, and quick links to other sites. These elements help employees stay informed and engaged without needing to search for updates.
A well-designed intranet homepage reflects multiple activities across the business. It supports internal communications, improves productivity, and helps employees understand what is happening across the organisation.
Web parts are the building blocks of SharePoint pages. They allow you to surface news, events, links, and content dynamically across multiple sites.
In the context of the video, web parts are used to roll up information from associated sites into the central hub. News and events can be pulled into the intranet homepage, giving users visibility across the entire hub without visiting individual sites.
This approach helps employees find information quickly and reinforces the hub as the central point of the intranet.
Permissions are where most SharePoint environments go wrong. Managing access using individual users quickly becomes unmanageable and risky.
Best practice is to manage site’s permissions using SharePoint Groups and security groups in Microsoft 365. This makes access easier to audit and reduces the chance of accidental exposure.
A critical point covered in the video is that syncing hub permissions is usually a bad idea. Sync hub permissions can unintentionally grant access across multiple sites. Instead, permissions should be managed at the site level, with the hub used for navigation and branding only.
Site owners should understand their responsibilities and receive training. Without this, even well-designed sites can become insecure over time.
When a site is associated with a hub site, search results can be scoped across the entire hub. This allows users to search once and see content from all related sites.
This improves knowledge management and reduces duplication. When users trust search, they are more likely to reuse existing content rather than creating new versions.
Search is one of the most powerful features in SharePoint, but it only works well when structure, permissions, and metadata are handled correctly.
SharePoint in Microsoft 365 integrates closely with other services, particularly Microsoft Teams. A SharePoint team site is often connected to a Team, supporting collaboration and file sharing.
The key is being deliberate. Not every site needs to be a team site. Communication sites and intranet pages often work better without Teams attached.
Clear SharePoint guidance helps users understand where to work, where to share, and where to find information, reducing friction in day to day work.
At Labyrinth Technology, we approach SharePoint as part of a wider security and governance strategy. As an MSP with deep experience in cyber security and data protection, we focus on reducing risk while improving usability.
We design the structure, permissions, and governance behind SharePoint intranets that scale and stay secure. The video linked to this guide shows exactly how we configure permissions, hub sites, and access in practice.
We help you make the right decisions early, so you do not pay for them later.
A well-structured SharePoint intranet can transform how your organisation works. It improves access, supports collaboration, and keeps employees informed.
The key is starting with the right guidance. Structure first. Permissions before content. Clear ownership at every level.
If you want to see how this is done step by step, watch our latest video on the Labyrinth Technology YouTube channel. If you want help designing or fixing your SharePoint environment, get in touch with our team. We will help you build something that works today and stays secure tomorrow.
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