Forum Discussion
Default Site Collection or new Site Collection for Intranet?
Hi there,
I am currently in the process of setting up a new Office 365 installation which includes SharePoint Online. The intention is to create a new Intranet site and I would like some guidance on whether to use the Default Site Collection or create a new Site Collection, for example:
- Default: https://company.sharepoint.com/SitePages/Home.aspx
- New: https://company.sharepoint.com/sites/intranet/SitePages/Home.aspx
I've read that it is best practice not to modify the default site collections that are created, although I was unsure if that was related more to on-premise SharePoint.
Is there any reason not to change the settings/layout of the default Site Collection?
If a new Site Collection is created, is it possible to set the SharePoint tile in the Office 365 menu to point to the new Site Collection home page? Is it also possible to redirect the company domain name in SharePoint to the new Site Collection?
If a new Site Collection is created what changes should be made to the default Site Collection to prevent users accessing it and making changes. Does it just need the default permissions removed?
Many thanks for any guidance you have on this from previous experiences. After looking over this for the past few days I've not been able to come up with the best way to move forward.
Regards.
4 Replies
I've created two Intranet sites using the root site for the tenant (different tenants, obviously), with no problems, one has been running for 3 years and the other for 1.
Vardhaman's first point is to do with site creation against the root site, well, as an admin I'm in charge of that and we don't do it, in fact who would use that facility? We create site collections using a SharePoint add-in that we wrote which gives us more control over the sites created and we can add metadata for the site for auditing, security etc.
His second point, well I have build scripts that can build the Intranet site against any site that I want, including the root site, again no problem here.
Third point, I'm not sure why you'd want to do this really. When developing the Intranet we develop on a dev site i.e. /sites/intranet-dev, UAT is /sites/intranet-uat, we have training on /sites/intranet-training, finally when we go live we deploy to the root site. In my experience with large Intranets, which ours was, we are deploying functionality in an Agile manner so we went live with parts of the Intranet such as News first, then departmental sites/pages then our other content. We were also migrating content from another system so this approach allowed us to be flexible with our publishers so they could be given the time to organise for the migration and to do the migration, which can take some time.
As you make your plans, you may want to consider how the new Hub sites may be used, see https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/SharePoint-hub-sites-new-in-Office-365/ba-p/109547
- My two cents here:
(1) I agree you should not use the default site collection as your Intranet. Instead, crate a new Site Collection for that and think carefully on the Information Architecture you want to put in place....the approach I'm following Today is to crate a Site Collection for each Department that is part of a Global Intranet
(2) You cannot change the behavior of the SharePoint Tile in the launcher what means you cannot modify the Url it points...what you could do is just add a custom Tile for your Intranet
(3) You cannot basically change anything in the SharePoint Online landing page what means the default site collection is going to be visible to usersHi and thanks for your reply.
I did manage to find the original article which discussed not using the Default Site Collection and thought it would be useful to share: http://www.vrdmn.com/2015/08/avoid-customizing-sharepoint-online.html
I've since realised that the SharePoint tile doesn't point to the root URL of the site so that shouldn't be a problem. I do like the suggestion of adding a new tile for the Intranet though. I'll look at removing permissions from the Default Site Collection to see what that results in for the user.
One of the next tasks will be to review the site collection requirements. I did find a useful article which looked at the different structures and I'm considering a single Site Collection as outlined here: https://sharepointmaven.com/structure-sites-sharepoint-intranet/
Regards.
