SharePoint Site Collection and Site Recommendations

Site CollectionThere 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 Blank Site (Only Available Through Powershell To Administrators)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 Team SiteCreate 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 BlogCreate this kind of site for a person or team to post ideas, observations, and expertise

that site visitors can comment on.

o Developer SiteCreate this kind of site for developers to build, test and publish apps for Office.

o Project SiteCreate a project site to manage and collaborate on a project. Creating a site with this template brings all status, communication, and artifacts relevant to the project into one

place.

o Community SiteCreate this kind of site when you need a place where community members can discuss topics of common interest. Members can browse and discover relevant content by exploring categories, sorting discussions by popularity or by viewing only posts that have a best reply. Members gain reputation points by participating in the community, such as starting discussions and replying to them, liking posts and specifying best replies.

Enterprise Site Templates

o Document CenterA site to centrally manage documents in your enterprise.

o eDiscovery CenterThis site is used to manage, search and export content for investigations matters. While it can also help teams collaborate during the investigation and keep track of cases, its focus should be on the eDiscovery capabilities/coordination opportunity it provides.

o Records CenterThis 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 Business Intelligence CenterThe Business Intelligence Center gives you a central location to store items, such as reports and dashboards. When you enable Excel Services and PerformancePoint Services, you will already have a location to store reports and dashboard content.

o Enterprise Search CenterThis site delivers an enterprise search experience. Users can access the enterprise search center to perform general searches, people searches, conversation or video searches, all in one place. You can easily customize search results pages.

o My Site HostA 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.

o Community PortalThis site is used for discovering new communities across the enterprise.

o Basic Search CenterA site for delivering the search experience. The site includes pages for search results and advanced searches.

o Visio Process RepositoryCreate 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.

Publishing Site Templateso 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 WikiA 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.

o Product CatalogThis site is used for managing product catalogs.

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 AdministratorsEach 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 QuotasWith 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 FeaturesThere 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?

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).

Blog Collaboration An excellent site for housing news articles, lengthier announcements, a personal blog, or even a team blog.

Project Site Collaboration This site template is used for managing and collaborating on a project. Project site coordinates project status and all additional information relevant to the project.

Community Site Collaboration A site where the community members can explore, discover content and discuss common topics. This site revolves around discussion topics and acts like a forum.

Document Center Enterprise 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)

eDiscovery Center Enterprise This site is used to manage, search and export content for investigations matters. While it can also help teams collaborate during the investigation and keep track of cases, its focus should be on the eDiscovery capabilities/coordination opportunity it provides.

Records Center Enterprise This site is used to submit and find important documents that should be stored for long-term archival.

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 multiple search centers it should be avoided when possible.

Enterprise Search Center Enterprise When you need a search site with multiple pages for results, searches, advanced searches, and easy

navigation between those search pages.

Basic Search Center Enterprise Only use this site template when the enterprise search center is unavailable.

Note: You should only have one search center site unless you have very specific search needs. (As the search webparts can live on other pages, but the search center represents a central search area.)

Publishing Site Publishing 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

Publishing 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 Publishing 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.