Forum Discussion

Iron Contributor

Jul 28, 2017

SharePoint sites vs. Site Collections - CONFUSED!

So, SharePoint sites vs. Site Collections has completely baffled me despite reading endless articles and watching many videos! As a very advanced end user, with very little admin. experience, I've r...

Iron Contributor

Aug 04, 2017

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.

SusanHanley

MVP

Aug 04, 2017

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).