Art of Adoption

Sometimes, there are those features you don’t really think about. Or even those that you only (re)discover after you stumble on them.

They’re just not loud, flashy or hyper promoted. But…they can make your live a lot easier!

And as I was working on a little think and happen to indeed, have to push this secret, correct order of buttons I thought: well, why not share it?

So here’s a little SharePoint of interest around Homesites and Hubsites. Call it a “hidden” combo cause, even though it doesn’t execute some sweet moves like in a certain fighter game, it does make things easier.

Time to set the scene!

It was a sunny day, around a 30 degrees plus, hot air blowing in through the open window, offering little to none of the refreshment my brain was so desperately craving for. Thinking was hard, as if even my neurons themselves seem to have fallen to the lazy summer weather. It was at their laziest moment, right before lunchtime that the “thing” occurred.

A question…straight from the mouth of an end-user in the form and shape of…a ticket. A ticket that was then transformed into a question directly pointed to me and my fried brain.

“Why do some have to ask permission to see our intranet main page?”

Wait..what?

“Nonsense! Impossible! There is an all-user group under the visitor permissions, they should all be able to see the main page!” Yeah…good and quick thinking my deep-fried cranium did there. Lucky for me, there’s that weird part of the brain that’s been fuelled by liters of tea a day and thus sufficiently provided with ample cooler liquid. And with what pre-lunch strength I found, I reached toward it and started my little SharePoint detective adventure.

I started with the victim: “Exactly: which site do people need to ask permission for?” With a grim face, the contents of the tickets’ body were shown…Ah, we had a lead. Not faced by its contents, seeing an opportunity instead of despair, I opened up the SharePoint admin center and checked the site.
Hello darkness my old friend… For old it was indeed, ancient some may have called it. Brought only to live by, what some experts might call, an uneducated migration try-out.
Yes, an old homesite was migrated, including all rights and settings and all that came with this relic of times past. No wonder half the company could not reach out to this forlorn site… This needed to be resolved, and quick!

But have you ever tried to kill an ancient being?

It did not give up without a fight. One would simply think: transfer the homesite settings to the new intranets main page. If only it were so simple…
Like all evil beings it had brought its minions. And they kept on shouting “you can’t execute this action” in a never-ending chant, without further explanation, without making sense.

But maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the hunger, maybe I’ve been playing a bit too many RPG’s (no, that could never be the case!) but if you can’t find the answers in one realm, one might be able to find solace in another.

Onto the Purview side of things! A little retention-minion was hoovering there, probably an incantation of the “tried-it-myself-school”, tied with deep “all sites” bonds to the ancient abomination that the old homesite was. BAM! I got rid of it…took a bit of time for the dust of the battle to settle, healed myself by consuming some lunch items in the meantime.

With new hope, I went back to the good realm of SharePoint, only to be greeted with the “you can’t do this action, cause the new homesite can’t be a hubsite”. By all that’s holy!
Of course the new intranet main site is a hub.

That’s were hubsite are for! To connect all that’s good and SharePointy…Did I really had to undo all that had been build? And how to restore it to it’s original order after the deed had been done?

In my defence, I might have had a heatstroke, or an after-lunch dip, but at least I came up with: use the Powers of the Export after setting the filter on “Hubsite”…

So, I did that.
I then transferred the old Home site, to the new (previous hub)site.
I then restored the site to being a hubsite.

And lo and behold, there was the discovery I had forgotten!

All spokes previously connected to the hub, where back in all their might and glory.

Without any further action needed. No need for the Powers of the Export…

I even double-checked, blinked my eyes, but it was no feverish dream, no shimmering mirage, it was truly there.
And this is what I wanted to share 🙂

If you ever need to transfer a SharePoint homesite:

1. Make sure you don’t have a (retention) policy in place that prevents deleting or altering a site, as this action is seen as such
2. Make sure the destination site (new home site) is not a hub site, or temporarily degrade it
3. And remember: there’s this little hidden thing that apparently, old spokes of that hub can be brought back to life be resetting the hub-status of the same site

And as an extra bonus: make sure that if you create a new intranet, that you also reset a new homesite, so users who navigate back to the beyond, don’t accidentality stumble upon an ancient relic.