Forum Discussion
SharePoint sites vs. Site Collections - CONFUSED!
Hi Oz,
If i may offer some personal experience which may help.
I have for the past year been installing/developing SPO for my organization.
1) Adding sites/collections from the admin centre for a Top Level site, this gives good foundation for permissions management which is, imo, up there as a top priority.
2) Sharegate (as mentioned by Dean_Gross) is a really good tool, which gives great fluidity to your environment structure. I have ahd to restructure an SP2010 environment as my first SP experience, and Shargate made the job very comfortable. It also supports many forms of reporting and migration.
3) From a 'Sharepoint Freshy' point of view, having a site/project purpose clear (ours is collaboration due to the nature of the business), and sticking to it is crucial. MS provide so many solutions for so many situations.
Finally, i prefer to have a URL structure /sites/region/dept so that there is an order to the chaos. When you create a site via the Sharepoint Tile, its added to the root by default, so unless you are creating a subsite (and then the URL is beneath the upper site), you will need to migrate the site. OR a Top level site is required, from the Admin centre.
New to the forums and advanced dev of SP, but hopefully the above is of some benefit.
Thanks Sam - really useful insights. I think I've come to the conclusion that given the nature of our content (Projects, HR, Finance, Operations, Consultants), they don't actually require a vertical structure and could happily sit as discrete site collections (set up as Groups for collaboration tools etc.). ShareGate seems to be where I end up for any thoughts of moving existing content around, so will probably end up going down that route. I just want to make sure that I've thought all current and future requirements through before I even touch the system!
One thing that is frequently forgotten is the inevitable organization changes. If you can come up with some vague/generic urls then when the department name changes from Human Resources to Employee Services, you may be able to just change the display title. (some of my clients have cared about urls, others have not)
All,
Tried following in a trial O365 (E3) account (tenant name: "blithe1"):
1. Created 2 additional "collections', in addition to main site collection :
https://blithe1.sharepoint.com <-- 'ROOT' collection created by default
https://blithe1.sharepoint.com/teams/Collection-1 <-- Created new collection with "../teams/.."
https://blithe1.sharepoint.com/sites/Collection-2 <-- Created a new collection with "../sites/.."2. When we see the properties of each of above collections then it shows that it has "1 subsite". I think this is for the "Home" site of that collection (i.e. the above URLs themselves).
3. When we log into Office-365 and select the SharePoint "TILE" then it directs to:
https://blithe1.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx <-- This is not a "site" since the gear icon doesn't have "Site Setting" option etc4. Here when we click the "+ Create Site" it asks for "Team Site" or "Communication Site". I created "Team Site" and site name as "PSO". It creates a site with URL https://blithe1.sharepoint.com/sites/PSO
AT THIS POINT IT DOES NOT GIVE US ANY OPTION TO SELECT SPECIFIC COLLECTION TO CREATE THE SITE IN. When we go to our three site-collections one-by-one and see "Site Contents" then none of the collection lists this "PSO" as a "subsite", so it's effectively not in any collection (and is obviously not a new collection in itself since it's not listed in collections list).
5. Next created a subsite under the "root" collection (by visiting collection-URL, then gear icon "Site Contents" and click "+ New" and select "Subsite").
URL (Fixed part): https://blithe1.sharepoint.com/
URL (Editable) : /Subsite-in-Root-Collection
It created the subsite and directed us to URL:
https://blithe1.sharepoint.com/Subsite-in-Root-Collection/SitePages/Home.aspx5. Similarly created a subsite under "collection-1":
URL (Fixed part): https://blithe1.sharepoint.com/teams/Collection-1/
URL (Editable) : /Subsite-in-Collection-1It created the site and directed us to URL:
https://blithe1.sharepoint.com/teams/Collection-1/Subsite-in-Collection-1/SitePages/Home.aspxSo from a "non-developer" perspective with no knowledge of actual low-level coding and structure of collections etc. it seems like all Site-Collections by default have a "HOME" site created (and with a set template "Project Site", "Team Site" etc). In case we don't intend to create additional sub-sites then this HOME site itself can serve the complete purpose. A collection is site itself and everything else is SUBSITE because home site (https://blithe1.sharepoint.com/teams/Collection-1/SitePages/Home.aspx) will contain all the subsequent sites in that collection (https://blithe1.sharepoint.com/teams/Collection-1/Subsite-in-Collection-1/SitePages/Home.aspx)
However rebellious it may sound, from a "non-techie" view, the "collection" may be just a "terminology" in SharePoint, it's actually just SITES and SUBSITES. In fact the collections like any other site also has users and permissions with names like "Collection-1 Visitors", "Collection-1 Members" etc.
One-Drive (https://blithe1-my.sharepoint.com/) listed as site collection, may be another special site providing ability to everyone in the organization to create their own quick "folders" in this site and able to share among each other.
Ofcourse there are other state of the art stuff in the actual features in these sites/subsites like "Flow", Power BI, External Data Sources, MetaData etc.
