Forum Discussion
SharePoint sites vs. Site Collections - CONFUSED!
The root site collection of the tenant is a special site collection that is not based on the standard site templates that you see when you create your own site collections.
You are touching on a key point, just because you can do something in SP, does not mean that you should. MS doesn't know what we need, so they allow us to do everything, which can frequently have strange results. another example is the ability to activate ALL of the feature in a Site Collection or in a Site, DO NOT do that, you will end up with a big mess of libraries and lists.
My advice is take it slow, keep it simple and keep asking questions in this forum.
Have fun at baseball, i have spent hundreds of hours doing that myself with my son. :)
Thank you all for this discussion. I found a lot of useful information.
Here are couple more questions I didn't find answers to:
1. Are subsites site collections themselves? I can create a sub-sub-site, so I assume they are collections, right?
2. Are there any information on the web what are "modern" and what are "legacy" style site collections? How they are different? I assume if I create a site collection from SP Admin I am creating a "legacy" site collection, and if I create a collection from '+ Create Site' button I am creating "modern" site? Can they be interchanged together, I mean can I create a "modern" sub-site in "legacy" site collection?
We are a large enterprise with 10-12 companies in different business fields (real estate, media, telecommunications, retail, etc). These companies also have another 5 to 50 smaller daughter companies. Since most of the parent companies do not really relate to each other we decided that we need to create separate intranet websites for all of them. Daughter companies will have subsites or no sites all all. We also would like to have one major intranet which unites all these parent companies under one roof and which will represent the parent root enterprise unit. That major intranet site will probably have only links to intranets of parent companies' and some corporate news, maybe a link to global address book.
Most of these parent companies have their own IT and HR staff so we need to separate management permissions for every intranet website.
What would be the best way to achieve such structure? I was thinking about creating a separate site collection for every intranet website, then delegating management permissions for IT department of different companies. Then create one more separate site collection for root level intranet. What is the best template for such sites? Should I create these site collections through SP Admin, or through "+ Create Site" button? What about subsites for daughter companies, should I just create a sub-site or a separete site collection all together?
Thank you for your answers in advance!
Thank you for your answer Dean. I did post it under new thread but it was marked as spam for some reason :(
1. no, a site collection cannot contain another site collection. the site collection is the top level and has functionality that only exists at that level. There is a site (root site) at the top and it can contain sites (sub-sites) that are many levels deep. The functionality at the lower levels is the same for every site (however, this can vary if different site templates are used)
Please create a new thread(s) with your own questions so that they can be more easily addressed by the community.