SharePoint 2007: Site Collections or Sites…That is the Question
There seems to be some confusion on the difference between site collections and sites in MOSS2007. Almost everyone I speak to that has experience with SPS 2003 stumble with this when they first start working with SharePoint 2007. So for that reason…I shall write a quick post about it.
In SharePoint Portal Server 2003, whenever you went to the sites directory and clicked the Create Site link under the Actions menu, you were creating a site collection. Every site collection has a top level site where things such as site templates, list templates, and cross site groups existed. Within a site collection, additional sites could be created that would share certain things (such as the template galleries and potentially permissions) with the top level site. In essence the site collection was it’s own unique hierarchy of SharePoint sites and for the most part completely independant of other site collections. In a stand alone installation of WSS there was typically only one site collection. In SPS, there could be hundreds which is why organizing them effectively in the Sites Directory and Areas (via listings) was very important and crucial. In fact, the primary role of SharePoint Portal Server aside from the additional functionality it provided in enterprise features such as search, audiences and personal sites – was the ability to organize the massive amounts of data that exists across multiple site collections better.
By default in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (if you are using the Corporate Intranet Portal template as your default site) when you go to the “Sites” link and click the Create site button…you are instead creating a site that is a member of the site collection your portal is in. So instead of having a portal layer and then a large number of unique collaborative collections below – everything now exists in a single site collection by default. This is great if within your organization, you want to “easily” share things such as templates, site columns, content types and navigational elements. Plus security and user management is much easier using this approach.
However some organizations will still require unique site collections since their business units are very unique and very little sharing is anticipated between groups. If that is the case, then you may instead wish to create site collections from the sites directory. To do this, you need to:
- Enable Self Service Site Creation in the Central Administration (Steps Below)
- Change the configuration settings under the Sites Directory (Steps Below)
So in essense, the new way is really much better since we no longer have to manage two completely separate levels however if you liked the old way better and want more unique site collections for your collaborative areas, you can have that too.
Enabling Self Service Site Creation
- Log into the Central Administration Site (Note this is a unique site collection as well and if you have it located on a funny port number, it is usually a good idea to add it to your My Links)
- Click Application Management
- Click Self-service site management
- Select the correct web application (that step is easy to miss) and select On for Enable Self-Service Site Creation
- Click OK
Enable the creation of Site Collections in Sites Directory
- From the portal, use the Site Actions menu, select Modify All Site Settings. If you are not on top level site you will need to go to Top Level Site Settings.
- Under site collection administration, select Site Directory Settings.
- Select the checkbox to create new site collections from sites directory.
August 22nd, 2006 at 6:02 pm
Excellent post Amanda. Very very nice. Im glad Shane got you on this one post a day kick… nice to see you writing more
Bob Fox
August 23rd, 2006 at 2:29 am
Great post !
i just make the same kind of post in french too
http://blogs.developpeur.org/themit/archive/2006/08/21/SiteDirectory_SiteCollection_MOSS_SharePoint_2007.aspx
But, i discover something weird
When you use the site directory to create a new “Site collection”, the new page ask you for some categories, after you have to choose the different permissions then you’ve got a fresh site collection under the “/sites” path
But after check, the link is not included in the site directory ?
>>> the site exist but not linked in the “Sites” list of the Site Directory
Have you got the same problem ? Is it a bug or a local prolem of my VPC ?
Thanks in advance
August 23rd, 2006 at 5:27 am
Thanks Bob!
Thanks Renaud – you did a fantastic job on your post as well. Very nice amount of detail. I will look into the issue you descripe a bit more. I wasn’t able to replicate it immediately but I am sure there is probably something buggy going on there.
Anyone else find what Renaud is describing?
August 24th, 2006 at 4:54 am
Yup i have the same experience. You can basically add multiple sitecollections beneath one ‘intranet’ portal.
January 3rd, 2007 at 6:13 am
Great post Amanda,
Further to your post I’ve been thinking … this is almost a required configuration? If by default all content is created within the portal site collection then you have definite scalbility impact. Single site collection means a single database… not sure if the old 2GB recommendation is relevant to 2007.
I’ll do some further digging, but food for thought
Thanks
January 11th, 2007 at 4:30 am
Hi, does anyone know if it is possible to share master pages, page layouts and content between sitecollections?
January 22nd, 2007 at 3:09 am
i get this error message when i click on this the “mysite” link “Your personal site cannot be created because Self-Service Site Creation is not enabled. Contact your site administrator for more information.”
i have configured shared service and enabled self service site creation. but still get this message.
January 29th, 2007 at 6:57 am
Liza: Yes and no: If you go with multiple Site Collections, I would recommend you use Features to package and deploy master pages, page layouts, content types etc. “No” – because this is not “sharing” – its “deploying the same multiple times”…
Amanda: Thanks for opening this issue! I’ve also been digging around this lately, and my main concerns are:
1) Scalability – what are the recommendations on number of site collections versus number of sites – have you found anything on that?
2) Backup and restore. OOTB, the only way to backup a site is by using stsadm -o export. For a site collection: stsadm -o backup (like in the old days…) However, doing a really simple test gave me the following: 6 secs for -o backup (complete site collection, standard Collab Portal) and 30 seconds for -o export (_blank_ Team Site) backup. If this explodes for sites having content, I suspect we cannot use stsadm -o export for e.g. nightly backups.
There are other issues to consider as well – e.g. Site Quotas are set pr. Site Collection. The “Site Usage and Confirmation” feature is also pr. Site Collection. Content Types and Site Columns are managed pr. Site Collection. And finally, the nifty Content Query Web Part can only find content from within the Site Collection in which it resides. So you really need to consider all these issues before deciding one thing or the other. I tend to recommend starting out with the default, and then try to live without Site Quotas and automatic site deletion. Backup is more critical, in my opinion. I think you (and I) will end up with a 3rd party tool, once the number of sites reaches something that cannot be backed-up nightly.
February 5th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Amanda, are there any web parts such as ‘content by query’ which will traverse several site collections?
February 11th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
It would seem that there is no “limit” per say as long as you are not storing more information in your site collection than your content database can handle. Check out Joel Olsen’s post on this for more information over at http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/01/31/tips-on-site-collection-sizing.aspx
I do have to say that yes, “it’s easier” however I would say that you lose on security in various fashions which I shan’t go into here.
June 18th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
When I try to turn the Self – Service Site Management on I get this error: “Cannot enable site creation because there is no site collection at “/” on the Web application. ” PLEASE help!
June 20th, 2007 at 5:28 am
Thanks for the information everyone. I am tossing up on whether to use Sites or Site Collections for Business Units sitting under a “Corp Portal”.
I have some questions I was hoping to get answered please.
1) So are the choices only – Sites in the one Content DB or Site Collections, each in their own DB. So what happens with your growing content DB’s. I heard a few things about splitting in SP2003 but am not familiar with the SharePoint 2003?
July 3rd, 2007 at 4:37 pm
I created a site collection in the scenario described by Renaud above. The URL for the site collection DOES list within the Sites list. From within the Site Directory, you must “View All Site Content” and then open the Sites list to see all the items. However, the URL for the site collection does not show up in the Table of Contents web part, which is used on the Site Map tab. I’ve seen other bloggers comment that the Table of Contents and Site Aggregator don’t work across site collections.
July 23rd, 2007 at 8:46 am
Amanda:
Great post. I was wondering if you could help with a design issue:
I want to have mutliple site collections in the internet zone all using the same port on my web server. Are there any drawbacks of having this structure? I am going to implement FBA and have users choose links on the site collection they log into. After clicking on the link, they will be redirected to other site collections.
Please advise.
Thanks.
SS
September 15th, 2007 at 12:45 am
[...] 9/14/2007 Setting up MOSS My Sites for a Enterprise 2.0 presentationManaging Remote Desktop on Windows Server 2003 I have been working more on my demo VM and wanted to use Remote Desktop to demonstrate various users in various roles. By default Windows 2003 is pretty well locked down and I found this great article from Mitch Tulloch which explains what you have to do. Terminal Services Licensing I noticed that there is a limit of 2 connections by default and I can install Terminal Services Licensing to get round this, but have not yet got round to fixing this up. I’m not quite sure what is involved on a development MSDN license. Active Directory & SharePoint Security Along with this, I had to set up Active Directory and some groups which I could then set up some scenarios. I was reading Joel Olsen’s article on Security on the best way of managing AD groups with SharePoint groups. It has some great points here especially when you are thinking of how to configure this for production and the easiest way of managing this across the Enterprise. MySites Part of the demonstration is a MySites based personalisation scenario to show Enterprise Social Networking in SharePoint. There isn’t much out there in terms of MySite configuration but I found a Activating MySite Creation by Amanda which shows you what you have to check from a default MOSS install to get it so Users can create their MySites. Microsoft SharePoint & the Enterprise While I’ve brought up Enterprise 2.0, there’s also a great post discussing whether SharePoint/Microsoft will be the Facebook of the Enterprise. I will be doing a presentation at the Perth User Group on Tuesday on Using SharePoint to implement Enterprise 2.0. Feel free to come along it’s at Microsoft HQ in QV1 after 5. InfoWorld also had a article on whether Microsoft will change it’s ways with the Office 2007 and go into direct competition with Google Apps. Cap Gemini are going into partnership with Google to sell the Enterprise edition so it’ll be interesting to see whether Microsoft will move into this space with it’s Live suite for the Enterprise space. Posted at 11:38 PM by Jeremy Thake | Category: Sharepoint: Portal | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0) [...]
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:27 am
Can anyone let me know how to change a portal site url in sharepoint 2007 please let me know my mail address is ct70085@ctimail.co.za
May 15th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Setting up MOSS My Sites for a Enterprise 2.0 presentation…
Managing Remote Desktop on Windows Server 2003
I have ……
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I’m new to SharePoint 2007. When I started to create sites I knew nothing about SiteDirrctory, so I created several Web Applications and then created site collections. Now I tried to create site collection by the way in this article, but it says /SiteDirectory doesn’t exist. What’s the problem?
What’s the difference between my method and the SiteDirectory way?
Thanks.
June 12th, 2008 at 3:48 am
Hi, I upraded in-place from SPPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 and found that all the original sites in 2003 were inclded in the sites list in 2007. However they did not appear as sites in 2007′s site directory. When i create new sites they appear with the site icon in site directory and are listed in the sites list. Is it possible to have the original 2003 sites also appearing in site directory?
June 18th, 2008 at 6:03 am
Hi Amanda, I do also have a problem when i created a site, the link is not included in the site directory. I did just create a site directory beneath the portal and there i create new sites and workspaces from the link “Create Site” on the page. I check for include in sites list, the site is created, but it does not show up in Sites List. Somebody resolved this?
July 10th, 2008 at 1:40 am
I guess this item is dead
September 10th, 2008 at 11:24 am
I have the same problem with new sites not being listed in site directory. Although it seems to work intermittenly. I am pulling my hair out trying to figure out what is wrong.
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:47 am
I have the same problem with new sites not being listed in site directory. It seemed to work initially (or was that when we were using SP 2003?) Not sure, now but I thought it was. However, it is no longer any thoughts?
October 17th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Got the same problem here with sites intermittenly not showing up in the directory. I have been working on it for a month now with MS with no results. Maybe they will just call it a feature.
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:13 am
Hi Amanda
Yes we too are having this problem where by we are creating multiple team site collections adding links manually to the site directory but they don’t show up in the table of content web part. The only place that I can see these links is in the sites list belong to the collaboration portal which you can see via the manage content and structure admin link. Any suggestions most welcome…
February 22nd, 2009 at 4:07 pm
[...] I discovered that we could change the default behavior of the Site Directory so that it would create site collections rather than simple subsites under the top level site collection. Bonus! [...]