SharePoint Site Collection and Site Recommendations
Site Collection
There are quite a few things to learn and understand about Site Collections. What follows are a few key aspects.
What is it?
A SharePoint site collection is a hierarchical set of sites that can be managed together. Sites within a site collection have common features, such as shared permissions, galleries for templates, content types, and Web Parts, and they often share a common navigation. A site collection contains a single top-level site, and any number of subsites organized in a hierarchy.
The site collection is typically created using one of the out of the box SharePoint site templates for the root site that is provisioned with it. The following are the available templates for a site collection (out of the box).
Tip: The template you choose for your site collection impacts what the site collection contains when it is provisioned. It’s always a good idea to select a template that closely matches the default content, components and settings you desire.
Site Collection Root Site Templates
· Collaboration Site Templates
There are a number of site templates that come with SharePoint that are designed to support collaboration based activities with default content.
o Team Site
Create this kind of site for teams to quickly organize, author, and share information. It provides a document library, and lists for managing announcements, calendar items, tasks, and discussions.
o Blank Site
Create a blank site if you want nothing provisioned within the site. This is the best template to use when restoring or importing content from a previous source.
o Document Workspace
Create this kind of site for colleagues to work together on a document. It provides a document library for storing the primary document and supporting files, a tasks list for assigning to-do items, and a links list for resources related to the document.
o Blog
Create this kind of site for a person or team to post ideas, observations, and expertise that site visitors can comment on.
o Group Work Site
This template provides a groupware solution that enables teams to create, organize, and share information quickly and easily. It includes Group Calendar, Circulation, Phone-Call Memo, the Document Library and the other basic lists.
o Microsoft Project Site
Create a project site to support team collaboration on projects. This site includes Project Documents, Project Issues, Project Risks, and Project Deliverables lists which may be linked to tasks in Microsoft Project Server 2010.
o Visio Process Repository
Create a Visio process repository site for teams to quickly view, share, and store Visio process diagrams. It provides a versioned document library for storing process diagrams, and lists for managing announcements, tasks, and review discussions.
· Meeting Site Templates
Typically the following meeting site templates really should not be used as the root site of a site collection unless there is a strong expectation of extremely large volumes of meeting content.
o Basic Meeting Workspace
A site to plan, organize, and capture the results of a meeting. It provides lists for managing the agenda, meeting attendees, and documents
o Blank Meeting Workspace
Create a blank site if you want nothing provisioned within the site. This is the best template to use when restoring or importing content from a previous source.
o Decision Meeting Workspace
A site for meetings that track status or make decisions. It provides lists for creating tasks, storing documents, and recording decisions.
o Social Meeting Workspace
A site to plan social occasions. It provides lists for tracking attendees, providing directions, and storing pictures of the event.
o Multipage Meeting Workspace
A site to plan, organize, and capture the results of a meeting. It provides lists for managing the agenda and meeting attendees in addition to two blank pages for you to customize based on your requirements.
· Enterprise Site Templates
o Document Center
A site to centrally manage documents in your enterprise.
o Records Center
This template creates a site designed for records management. Records managers can configure the routing table to direct incoming files to specific locations. The site also lets you manage whether records can be deleted or modified after they are added to the repository.
o PowerPoint Broadcast Site
A site used for hosting PowerPoint broadcasts. Presenters can connect to this site and create a link for remote viewers to watch a slide show in a web browser.
o Business Intelligence Center
A site for presenting Business Intelligence Center.
o Enterprise Search Center
A site for delivering the search experience. The welcome page includes a search box with two tabs: one for general searches, and another for searches for information about people. You can add and customize tabs to focus on other search scopes or result types.
o My Site Host
A site used for hosting personal sites (My Sites) and the public People Profile page. This template needs to be provisioned only once per User Profile Service Application, please consult the documentation for details.
o Basic Search Center
A site for delivering the search experience. The site includes pages for search results and advanced searches.
o FAST Search Center
A site for delivering the FAST search experience. The welcome page includes a search box with two tabs: one for general searches, and another for searches for information about people. You can add and customize tabs to focus on other search scopes or result types.
· Publishing Site Templates
o Publishing Portal
A starter site hierarchy for an Internet-facing site or a large intranet portal. This site can be customized easily with distinctive branding. It includes a home page, a sample press releases subsite, a Search Center, and a login page. Typically, this site has many more readers than contributors, and it is used to publish Web pages with approval workflows.
o Enterprise Wiki
A site for publishing knowledge that you capture and want to share across the enterprise. It provides an easy content editing experience in a single location for co-authoring content, discussions, and project management.
Note: Some of the above templates are not available in Foundation or Standard.
Why would you use one?
There are many reasons why you might chose to create a site collection in SharePoint.
· For Security Management Benefits:
Every site collection creates a security boundary between one collection of sites and another collection of sites. Each site collection has its own collection of SharePoint groups and ACL references.
· For Privacy or Management Benefits and Different Site Collection Administrators
Each site collection has a role of “Site Collection Administrator” and a person or more assigned to that role. There are times when either for privacy/confidentiality reasons you cannot have a specific site collection administrator with the rights to see that sites content, or where you have different people that should be assigned to manage that collection of sites. The second is an extremely common scenario in large enterprise organizations where there is a need to distribute the technical ownership of site collection administration.
· For Search Separation
· For Workflow Separation
· To Impose Specific Storage Quotas
With SharePoint Site Collections you can define specific storage quotas and email warnings to notify users when they are approaching a defined threshold on their site collection storage.
· To Impose Specific Sandbox Quotas
With a SharePoint Site Collection you can define the maximum number of points sandbox solutions can use per day. Additionally you can also configure an email warning when storage exceeds a certain number of points.
· So Your Site Collection Does Not Have The Same Active (or Inactive) Site Collection Features
There are many times when this comes in handy. In SharePoint 2010 there are quite a few Site Collection level features you may not want active on specific site collections.
· To Have a Separate Help Library to Store Custom Help
Why wouldn’t you use one?
If the above benefits aren’t a requirement than it is almost always better to not create a separate site collection. That way you don’t have the added management of many of those factors, the additional complications of webparts being constrained to one site collection and easier navigation.
Site (or Subsite)
There are quite a few things to learn and understand about SharePoint sites or subsites. What follows are a few key aspects.
What is it?
A subsite is a single SharePoint site within a site collection. A subsite can inherit permissions and navigation structure from its parent site or these can be specified and managed independently. Creation of subsites can be delegated to users of a site collection, but creation of site collections must be performed by a service administrator.
Typically within an organization you will create additional site templates over time. These are often built based on the out of the box site templates. What follows is an outline of each of the out of the box site templates and when I think they should be used.
Site Template / Category / When should you use it?Blank Site / Blank & Custom / Rarely used as anything but the root of a site collection (see site collection templates) for easier restore.
Personalization Site / Blank & Custom / This is should only be used in MySites.
Team Site / Collaboration / A site that automatically creates a shared documents library, site pages library, an announcements list, a calendar, a task list, and a team discussion list.
The most popular template for unstructured or semi structured collaboration sites and excellent for getting people started quickly. However you should be cautious choosing this site when you need page management or publishing features as it would be better to provision a publishing site and then the lists/libraries necessary as it ensures only one pages library will exist (versus two if the feature is activated after on this site).
Document Workspace / Collaboration / A simplified team site that is focused around people collaborating on one primary document and it’s supporting material. With one shared document library, a task list, and a links list it is a more basic version of the team site template.
Group Work Site / Collaboration / This site is meant to accelerate and simplify coordinated group work. Typically for more structured collaboration where there are many phone calls, meetings, and scheduling needs beyond a basic team site.
This site contains a group calendar, circulation (a custom list), phone-call memo (a custom list for managing calls), an announcements list, a tasks list, a links list, ‘what’s new’ webpart, a team discussion list, a whereabouts list (a custom list), and even a resources list.
Enterprise Wiki / Collaboration / A site specifically designed to simplify the process for creating and provisioning a new wiki. The most common starting wiki for organizations is an “Acronym Wiki” which houses many key acronyms for the organization and references the acronyms meaning, usage, useful policies, procedures, teams, contacts, and more within the organization.
Document Workspace / Content / A simplified team site that is focused around people collaborating on one primary document and it’s supporting material. With one shared document library, a task list, and a links list it is a more basic version of the team site template.
Blog / Content / An excellent site for housing news articles, lengthier announcements, a personal blog, or even a team blog.
Document Center / Content / When you use the template, the resulting site is optimized for creating, using, and storing large numbers of documents. A Document Center site provides features for creating and managing large sets of documents. The Document Center site template has the recommended document management features enabled by default.
The features it enabled by default are:
· Document ID Service
· Metadata Navigation and Filtering
· Default Webparts (Newest Documents, Modified By Me, and Highest Rated Documents)
Publishing Site / Content / When you have a strong need for managed pages, distributed publishing of page content, and more pages based content management needs this is a good template to use. It provisions a site that has the publishing features already activated and simplifies the number of libraries/lists so that by default only basic ones are enabled (which publishing relies upon).
Using advanced page management features like page layouts requires that publishing be activated, so if you are planning on using consistent page layouts, or many page layouts this is probably a good template to start with versus the less structured team site templates.
Publishing Site with Workflow / Content / Whenever any site is created using the ‘Publishing Site With Workflow’ template it will have the ‘approval’ workflow activated. You would create one for the same reason you would create a publishing site, except in this one you want a much more rigorous publishing process.
This allows for page scheduling, due dates, and more. It requires a minimum of 6 clicks to publish a page for a user.
Enterprise Wiki / Content / A site specifically designed to simplify the process for creating and provisioning a new wiki. The most common starting wiki for organizations is an “Acronym Wiki” which houses many key acronyms for the organization and references the acronyms meaning, usage, useful policies, procedures, teams, contacts, and more within the organization.
Records Center / Data / This site should only be used when creating a read only based archive or ‘records repository’ which will route incoming files to specific locations within the site. Sometimes multiple record center sites are necessary depending on the file plan, and disposition policies being enforced within your organization, however just like search centers it should be avoided when possible.
Basic Meeting Workspace / Meetings / A simplified site that is meant to plan, organize and capture results of a meeting. It provides lists for managing and planning an agenda, managing the meeting attendees, and documents related to the meeting.
Blank Meeting Workspace / Meetings / This meeting workspace site contains very little and should only be used as a base for creating your own meeting workspace template(s).
Decision Meeting Workspace / Meetings / This meeting workspace contains a place for storing documents but also focuses on tasks, and recording the decisions made in a meeting. When many action items and decisions are expected the default content in this site may fit the groups needs more effectively than the basic meeting workspace.