SharePoint Hub Sites are crucial for organizing your intranet, connecting related sites to a parent hub, creating meaningful associations, and navigation.
(image credits: Microsoft Learn)
Learn more about planning them here: Planning your SharePoint hub sites.
Automate365's Hub Site Association in templates enables you to automatically connect newly provisioned sites to existing Hub Sites. This ensures consistent navigation, branding, search results, and (optionally) visual theme across related sites from day one.
You can define exactly how this hub association will be automatically enforced during provisioning by setting it up in your BindTuning custom templates.
Automatic Hub Site Association is configured during the creation/editing of an Automate365 template. To edit:
Navigate to the template editing wizard (e.g., when creating a new template or modifying an existing one).
In the left-hand navigation of the wizard, click on Structure and Content.
Hub Site Association options
During the template creation process in Automate365, you can define how new sites provisioned from this blueprint will integrate with your existing SharePoint Hubs. Below are the three options to configure this association:
Pre-defined Hub Site
When you choose this option, sites created from your template will be automatically associated with a single, specific Hub Site that you select from a list of existing Hubs. End-users provisioning the site will not have a choice in this association.
💡 This is ideal for strict standardization where all sites created from a particular template must belong to a specific hub. For example, a "Marketing Campaign Site" template should always be associated with the "Corporate Marketing Hub." This ensures immediate compliance and consistent branding for all related projects.
User-selected Hub Site
With this setting, the end-user creating the new site is required to choose a Hub Site from a list of available Hubs during the provisioning process. The template mandates an association but gives the user the flexibility to pick the most relevant hub.
💡 This option is excellent for automating hub assignment based on external input, such as a helpdesk request form. For instance, if a user fills out a helpdesk ticket requesting a new departmental site and selects their department, Automate365 can read that input and automatically assign the site to the corresponding departmental hub. This ensures a mandatory hub association is enforced without requiring the end-user to make a manual selection during the provisioning flow itself.
Optional association by the user
This provides the most flexibility to the end-user. They are given the option to associate the new site with an available Hub Site during provisioning, but it is not a mandatory step. They can choose to associate it or proceed without an association.
💡 Use this for general-purpose templates where Hub association is beneficial but not strictly required for every single instance. For example, a "Team Collaboration Site" template might offer the choice to associate with a relevant project hub, but allow users to create standalone sites if their specific collaboration doesn't fit neatly into an existing hub structure.
Hub Theme Inheritance
Once a Hub Site association is configured, you can also decide whether sites created from this template should pick up the hub's visual theme rather than the default SharePoint theme.
Inherit theme from selected Hub:
When checked, sites provisioned from this template automatically apply the theme of the hub they're associated with, keeping colors, fonts, and overall look consistent with the rest of the hub.
Leave unchecked to let the site keep its own theme (e.g., the one defined elsewhere in the template) regardless of hub association.
This is useful when a hub represents a business unit or region with established branding. For example, associating new project sites with a "Sales EMEA" hub and inheriting its theme ensures every new site looks like it belongs, with no manual styling needed after provisioning.
This setting only affects BindTuning themes. SharePoint's native Change the look (colors and fonts) is always automatically inherited from the hub by associated sites, regardless of this checkbox.
This is part of the larger template creation process. For the full picture of what you can configure there, read Understanding Templates in Automate365.