Forum Discussion
SharePoint sites vs. Site Collections - CONFUSED!
I think the best answer is "it depends," but this might help.How to Choose between a Team Site and a Communications Site. Yes, when you see "create site" you are actually creating a new site collection - and this is actually what you want for your collaboration spaces. You will have lots of site collections backed by Office 365 Groups for membership when you create Team Sites. (Using Create Site from SharePoint home is probably the easiest way to do this.) When you create a privae team site, you'll want to be sure to assign someone to be the Owner other than you so that they can add other members to the site, both internal and external people as needed. It looks like your questions are about a combination of "broadcast/publishing sites" and private team sites. For department sites that serve as your intranet, you now have two choices - create a "classic" site collection from the Admin center or create independent modern Communication Sites from SharePoint home. Communication Sites should not really have subsites - though they are not blocked in the UI. However, you will currently need to write some code to create a shared navigation for these independent site collections if you want to connect them to feel like a traditional intranet. If you choose to create department sites using a classic SharePoint site collection at the "root," you can create sub-sites with unique permissions for each department. Most of the time, this type of site collection has read permissions for the entire organization and unique edit/owner privileges for each department.
I'm not sure what to recommend for your Operations and Associates sites since I don't know if you are talking about collaboration spaces or communications spaces, but your Project sites should almost certainly each be modern independent site collections created from SharePoint home. That will allow you the most flexibility and security in terms of governing who can have access to each one.
Thanks SusanHanley - very useful. I think I'm decided that for all our project sites and internal collaboration sites I'll use the +Create Site button in SharePoint home and create a new site collection / Group.
For the Associates 'bucket' I'll probably create a Communications Site although I may want to encourage collaboration between the Associates so may end up creating another standard Group.
For the Operations bucket, I'd like a top-level site with 3 sites underneath, each encouraging collaboration between the relevant people - do you think I'd be better creating 4 standard sites using the +Create Site button and just adding links to the navigation between them, or creating a top-level site and 3 sub-sites? How would this work with regards collaboration - create an assoicated Team for each?
Thanks again and your response has really helped.
- It depends on the objective for each of the 4 sites. Let's assume that the Operations site is for publishing/sharing content by a small number of people for the consumption of a larger group. If that is the case, I would use a Communication Site for that. If the other three sites are about collaboration, they can be team sites. In the Operations Site, you can make links to all three team sites. These are all separate site collections, by the way. In each team site, you can make a link to the Operations Site AND to the "sister" team sites. Within each team site, members of the Team are in the Members Group and the "sister" group folks can be added to the Visitors group if you want them generally to have Read access and if you want to give them edit rights to individual documents, the team members can share Edit links with individuals. There is no right answer to your question, by the way, but I still think I would start with the primary objective for the site: communication (Comm Site) or collaboration (Team Site).
Let me start by asking a question. You asked plenty of questions so I thought I could ask one too ;-)
Why do you care about sites vs site collections?
The general answer here can be:
1. Security (different permissions set from the top of the site collection)
2. Limiting database size ( this is an on premises argument only, As I'm less worried about backups in office 365)
3. Url ( not having to type /sites or /teams)
4. Logical separation
5. Use of site collection limited web parts ( e.g. CQ web part)
If you are now architecting an intranet, I would try and include as many as possible new style sites. So limit yourself to Communication sites (when they become fully available) and team sites with modern SPFx web parts. There are more and more examples available and plenty of consultancies happy to help. I will not mention any here but feel free to contact me.
I agree that all is very confusing and it looks every now and then a bit that Microsoft is offering many differnt options to do almost the same. Making the right choice straight fro the beginning is not always easy.
Thanks Pieter Veenstra - good question! The key reasons I didn't think I wanted lots of site collections were what I've read around:
- Managing security at the top-level and simply letting the inheritence of sub-sites work its way down to the bottom.
- Numerous articles suggest that there are lots of admin settingsset at site collection level which impact sites / sub-sites. I therefore assumed that if we make a decision that requires a setting change, this would be easier the less collections we have.
- With the random structure I've inherited, I'm going to need to do a lot of copying / moving content around. Various articles seem to suggest this is easier within a site collection than between collections.
With the help of you and others, the fog is slowly clearing with regards what structure I should have, but I don't seem to be making any progress on how best to move what we've already got into the new structure when it's created.
Thanks again, Oz
