A SharePoint site collection is a group of websites that have the same owner and share administration settings, such as permissions. When you create a site or website collection, you automatically create a top level website in the site collection. Depending on your organization or business needs you can create one or more sub-sites below the top level websites or sites.
The top level sites and sub-sites allow different levels of control , several features and settings for sites. According to your sites hierarchy, users can have a main working site for the entire group and individual workstations and shared for complementary projects. You can create separate site collections for different divisions or external Web sites.
Creating a SharePoint Site Collection
How to organize site or sub-site collections
The way you decide to organize collections of sites depends on the size of your organization and your business needs. Knowing some basic details like, for example, what business category is going to use the site collection or which users need access to the sub-site or site collection, can help you make decisions about the type of sub-site or site template that can be used, the amount of storage can assign or number of SharePoint site collections that you must create. If you need to revise the limits or the number of sub-site or site collections in your plan, learn how to lift software limits in sharepoint . When you are ready to start creating SharePoint site collections, use SharePoint Administration Center.
If you want to find out: Ask yourself: Which site templates to use? You can use the site templates to create site collections. Site templates are per-filled with lists, libraries, pages or other items that meet different business needs. You can use the templates as they are or you can customize the site to fit your needs The sites will inherit the properties of the template you select for the site collection. You can use more than one template site or sub-site in the site collection.
Before creating sub-site or site collections ask yourself the following questions
- What kind of content is stored on the sites?
- Will the site be used for a specific purpose?
- How do users need to interact with this content?
- How many site collections are needed?
Business needs and limits overall storage affect this decision. Certain types of sites such as the Public Website, the Application Catalog, Search Center or the My Site Host exist as separate site collections. Some of these site collections are automatically created when registering at Office 365. You may need additional site collections if your organization has other purposes.For example, there are groups that need their content that has some restricted access.
If you want sites collections for a large group or organization ask yourself the following questions:
- Are there divisions or groups who need to maintain separate data?
- Is there a need different site collections for specialized purposes will be?
- Do you plan to use applications for SharePoint? (In that case, you may want to create the Application Catalog site.)
- How much storage is needed for each site collection?
When your organization acquires the SharePoint Online service, is assigned an amount of storage depending on your site user licenses purchased and the type of plan purchased Office 365. The total amount of storage is grouped so you can determine how much storage corresponds to each site collection (minimum 50 MB). By assigning storage to a new SharePoint site collection, you can see the total amount of storage allocated to your organization and how much of the total storage organization still must be assigned to new site collections. If necessary, may increase in the future the amount of storage set for a site collection.You can also monitor the amount of storage used by each site collection and be alerted when a site collection approaches its limit of storage allocation.
If you find that your organization is running out of storage, you can perform the following three actions:
- Reduce the amount of content in SharePoint Online sites
- Remove one or more SharePoint site collections
- Buy more storage from Microsoft or your provider-It is important to check how much space is being used and to establish guidelines and directives with site collection administrators and site owners with regard to file size limitations that may want to set in the organization.
Create a site collection
A collection of Microsoft SharePoint Online sites is a hierarchical set of sites that can be administered as a group or individually. The sites in a site collection share administration settings, navigation and other features such as permissions. Each SharePoint site collection contains a single top level site and some numbers of additional sites. A site can inherit-permissions and navigation of its parent, although these features can also be specified and managed independently. As Service Manager SharePoint Online, you delete or create site collections in the Administration Center of Microsoft SharePoint Online.
Creating a site collection
Service administrators can create SharePoint Online site collections for the entire organization and also assign primary sites at each site collection. The admin of each site or sub-site collection has all permissions to configure sites and features in a collection. As the admin you can also add or remove sites and change all the settings for sub-site or site collection. services administrator defines the specific language of a site collection.
Decide in advance what type of default language you will use on all collection of sites and their sub-sites because once a language is specified, you can not change. After creating a SharePoint site collection, it is important to check if the locale is accurate. For example, to create sites in French, the locale is always defined in France language even if you are in another country. Therefore, regardless of the language you choose, you should check that the locale is appropriate for your location.
Security of your sites
To maximize safety and efficiency, the service manager SharePoint Online and Microsoft Online Services administrator must be the same person.
- Log in to the Administration Center SharePoint Online.
- On the home page, click Manage site collections.
- In the tab ribbon Site Collections in the Contribute section, click New.
- Select Site Collection.
- In the dialog “New-Site-Collection” dialog box, type the following information:
- In-the “Title-box”, type the title for the site collection.
- In Web-address, select a domain-name and a-URL from the list and then-type a URL-name for the site-collection.
- In Squad-selection in the drop-down-list Select-a-language,
- In Template-Selection, in the Choose-a-template, choose a template for your site collection.
- In Time-zone in the Time-Zone-box, choose the appropriate standard time zone for the-location of your-site-collection.
6. Click on the OK button. The new-site-collection appears in the list of your website URLs.
After you have followed the above procedures and guides, you will find it much easier to use SharePoint site collection and other programs that are associated with it.