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SharePoint Online sites hierarchy in Office 365 and best practice
This discsussion has two parts: Understanding the SharePoint Online site hierarchy Best practice for the location of sites Firstly, I've seen three different approaches in Office 365 where you...
- Are you familiar with the difference between Site Collections and Sites in SharePoint? If I read carefully your post, I think that's could be the problem. Let my try to explain what you have been doing:
Options (1) and (2) allow you to create a site collection in SPO...each site collection is in fact an information silo that has not relation with other site collections so each site collection is an independent information structure.
Option (3) allows you to create a subsite under the root site collection in your SPO tenant. You must know here that this is going to change in the future so when you click on create a new site from the SPO landing page, you will be effectively creating a new site collection as happens with options (1) and (2)
In regards of the Site Manager, it allows to see your sites structure in a site collection but it does not allow to see other site collections
Your option 3 will create a subsite beneath the root site collection for your tenant, the site where the subsites are created can be changed in SharePoint Admin->Settings.
Another option against option 3 is to add your own app or form to create a site collection within the tenant using a SharePoint App, the app would require Tenant Full Control permissions, there are various samples for this in the OfficeDev PnP:
https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples
https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP-Partner-Pack/tree/master/OfficeDevPnP.PartnerPack.SiteProvisioning
To do this you would need to specify the new app URL in SharePoint Admin -> Settings. How you do this is up to you but you are constrained by the fact that the application will display in a SP dialog from the Create New button. You can use window.postMessage to resize this dialog from your application if required.
Another option against option 3 is to add your own app or form to create a site collection within the tenant using a SharePoint App, the app would require Tenant Full Control permissions, there are various samples for this in the OfficeDev PnP:
https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples
https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP-Partner-Pack/tree/master/OfficeDevPnP.PartnerPack.SiteProvisioning
To do this you would need to specify the new app URL in SharePoint Admin -> Settings. How you do this is up to you but you are constrained by the fact that the application will display in a SP dialog from the Create New button. You can use window.postMessage to resize this dialog from your application if required.