Forum Discussion
SharePoint sites vs. Site Collections - CONFUSED!
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