Forum Discussion
SharePoint sites vs. Site Collections - CONFUSED!
An important point to keep in mind is that External Sharing is enabled/disabled at the Site Collection level. For this reason, I typically recommend that new site collections be created for projects that will require collaboration with external organizations. Give that you may want/need to ensure that external partners do not interact with one another, then having separate site collections makes this much easier.
But as the others have stated, it really depends on the specific business/industry/requirements. In your scenario I would expect to create many site collections (possibly one for each project or one for each external partner.
FYI, when you create a new Team (in the Teams app), you will get a new site collection in the tenant.sharepoint.com/teams/.... path. A new Folder will be created in the default Documents library for each channel added to the Team. This site collection will not have external sharing enabled.
Thanks Dean_Gross - more useful information to help me plan the restructure. I think I'm now sorted for projects (i.e. a new site collection (via a Group) for each) and just have to decide for the other bits and pieces. That said, I now understand how it all works much better so it should be an easier task. The only thing that's still unclear I how I physically restructure existing sites / content (i.e. move document / libraries from one site / site collection to another). Thanks again, Oz
There are several ways to reorg content:
1. use a 3rd party tool, this provides the ability to keep all metadata, schedule jobs, do batches and much more.
2. drag/drop files - easy, but tedious, and it changes the Created/Modified info and it doesn't work if you have existing custom metadata
3. Use workflows to send files from one location to another - typically not practical if you have a lot of existing data, but can work well to help during a tranistion period.
4. If you have Publishing Infrastructure feature enabled, use the Site Contents and Structure tool to rearrange the Site Collection , this won't help across collections.
5. some others that I'm not thinking of at this time:)
Thanks Dean_Gross. I don't think the people who setup the existing SharePoint infrastructure have used any of the SharePoint functionality other than filing documents in folders - hopefully drag and drop will therefore be an option despite the change to created / modified information and loss of versions. My other option is probably the third party tools you mention so I need to go and research those. A lot of my reading to date has ended up at ShareGate's website so I guess that may be a place to start. Thanks again, Oz.
