SharePoint 2010 : Understanding Site Collection Options

This section reviews the different categories of site collections, and touches briefly on best practices for mapping out a site collection or group of site collections to meet the organization’s requirements. When a farm administrator wants to create a new site collection, the Create Site Collections tool can be found under the Site Collections section on the Application Management page. These tools are broken into Collaboration, Meetings, Enterprise, Publishing, and Custom groupings, as follows:

• Collaboration site collection templates— These include Team Site, Blank Site, Document Workspace, Blog, Group Work Site, and Visio Process Repository. Many organizations use the Team Site template because it includes a very useful set of lists and libraries. The Group Work site includes Group Calendar, Circulation, Phone-Call Memo, a Document Library, and other basic lists. The Visio Process Repository is designed to store Visio process diagrams, and announcements, tasks, and discussion lists.

• Meetings site collection templates— These include Basic Meeting Workspace, Blank Meeting Workspace, Decision Meeting Workspace, Social Meeting Workspace, and Multipage Meeting Workspace. It is fairly unusual to create a site collection for meetings, but if an organization knows it will be extensively using Meeting Workspaces, this can be a convenient way to organize them under a root URL.

• Enterprise site collection templates— These include Document Center, Records Center, Business Intelligence Center, Enterprise Search Center, My Site Host, Basic Search Center, and FAST Search Center. These are fairly specialized templates, all of which (except the Business Intelligence Center) can be created as a subsite beneath a nonpublishing top-level site.

• Publishing site collection templates— Comprised of Publishing Portal and Enterprise Wiki. Publishing sites are designed for sites that provide content to a large group of readers, and are better suited to that purpose. There are limitations on which sites can be created beneath publishing sites, so there are fewer options from a site collection design standpoint. A Publishing Portal, for example, would be a good choice for an intranet, but not if it will house departmental sites at the second level, unless they are created as site collections.

• Custom site collection templates— An empty site can be created, and a template assigned at a later time.

Designing the Site and Site Collection Wireframe

A sample wireframe is provided in Figure 1, which is a simplified design often used for medium-sized companies (500–5,000 users) and includes a top-level site collection for intranet purposes, separate site collections for departments such as IT and HR, and a site collection for cross-departmental uses (such as projects).

Figure 1. Sample site collection wireframe.

This simple example shows a ContentDB icon for the top-level site collection, which in this example contains intranet content, and ContentDB icons for three other site collections that are nested beneath the top-level site collection. Each organization will need to work on balancing the depth of the structure with its breadth, because a structure that is too “deep” can be hard to navigate, as can a structure that is too wide. There are management complexities involved in creating too many site collections, whereas on the other hand, too few site collections may result in content databases that grow to “unwieldy” sizes (for example, hundreds of gigabytes, or even a terabyte or more).

A tool such as this makes it easy for design committees to understand the logical design and can be expanded to include the lists and libraries that will be included in each site, and the permissions for each site, and thus become a useful management tool.