Is using Hub sites the new way of having sub-sites

Question

I am working on a new sharepoint online project. and we need to build the following:

1. Have a main intranet site where users can publish news, events and general documents and templates.
2. To have separate sites or sub-sites for each department. Such as HR, IT, Finance, etc.

Now I was planning to follow the traditional way of doing things, mainly by:

1. Create a new classic team site (mainly to use the built-in root site collection).

2. To create separate classic team sub-sites for our departments.

But recently I read about Hub sites, and it is been mentioned that using hub sites should be the new/modern way of having sub-sites.

So I am not sure if for my above case I should follow having classic team site and classic sub-sites? OR I should use Hub sites and have departments' site collections that are linked to the hub site?

second point. one of the main benefits i usually get from using site collection and sub-sites, is that columns and content types created at the root site (site collection) will be available to all the sub-sites without having to set content type hubs or any things else, also i have the ability to have a sub-site which inherit from its root site, finally i also have the ability to have sub-sites of each sub-site. so i am not sure if these features/capabilities are offered for us when we use site collections linked to Hub Sites?

Answer 1

Certainly, the standard recommendation moving forward would be to use modern sites and a flat structure, rather than subsites and/or classic sites. You're right, this changes how we approach things like content types.

The content type story is an interesting one these days:

• Content type hubs haven't been updated recently, nor have they been talked about at any recent conference, that I'm aware of
• MS seems to have decided that they like developers to be involved for these scenarios, as guidance points to resources such as the PNP dev tools, which certainly provide simple mechanisms to deploy virtually any sharepoint asset to site collections, including site columns and content types
• Site scripts allow us to deploy content types and site columns when the site is created, no hub site needed. (site scripts involve JSON and powershell, so again, some developer skill is needed here)

That said, there are some interesting benefits of flat structures, including permissions. Subsites per department often means breaking permission inheritance, which many users find confusing to administer. Flat structures mean that each site simply has permissions applied directly, without dealing with the mess of breaking inheritance.

Answer 2

Another way to approach this is: how much risk is acceptable in my project ?

The flat model and hub sites gives us a lot out of the box, however once we hit the boundries, we hit them at full speed, and only a very limited number of the old tricks we know is available in Modern SharePoint.

One thing is for sure, we'll be writing a lot of PowerShell in the next few years in order to update all those disjoined site collections