SharePoint Online sites hierarchy in Office 365 and best practice

[Jacques van der Hoven]

This discsussion has two parts: 

1. Understanding the SharePoint Online site hierarchy
2. Best practice for the location of sites 

Firstly, I've seen three different approaches in Office 365 where you can manage SharePoint sites: 

1. Office 365 Admin > Resources > Sites > Add a site button
2. Office 365 Admin > Admin centers > SharePoint > Site Collections > New button
3. Office 365 SharePoint landing page > Create site button

Using approach 1 above the site seems to end up as a root site alongside other /teams/ or /sites/ sites. (I can see this in SharePoint admin center under site collections)

Similarly using approach 2 above you end up with the site created at the same location. (I can see this in SharePoint admin center under site collections)

Then, using approach 3 above I created another test and yet that site didn't show up in Site Collections in the SharePoint Admin Center. Where does this end up in the hierarchy? 

SiteManager.aspx

If I go to the site manager using the following URL: https://mycompany.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sitemanager.aspx I see the following:

• Website
  • Company Team Site - no problem
    • Subsite 1 - no problem
    • Subsite 2 - no problem
  • Site created using approach 3 above - no problem

What I don't see are the sites created using approach 1 and 2. 

So my questions are: 

1. Where did my sites created using approach 1 and 2 end up if they're showing in the SharePoint admin center but not in the site manager
2. If you are architecting for best practice which is the best approach 1, 2 or 3 considering where these sites end up in the site hierarchy? Consider having a company with dedicated sites for HR, Accounting, Operations, IT, etc. Ideally I would imagine each of these should have their own root site, but my concern is how these sites are created and where they end up. 

[#2]

I'm not sure if I 100% understand your post.

Approach 1 and 2 are creating site collections approach 3 is giving you subsites.

Site manager gives you an overview of your current site collection.

Office 365 Admin/SharePoint Admin gives you an overview of site collections

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Are you familiar with the difference between Site Collections and Sites in SharePoint? If I read carefully your post, I think that's could be the problem. Let my try to explain what you have been doing:
Options (1) and (2) allow you to create a site collection in SPO...each site collection is in fact an information silo that has not relation with other site collections so each site collection is an independent information structure.
Option (3) allows you to create a subsite under the root site collection in your SPO tenant. You must know here that this is going to change in the future so when you click on create a new site from the SPO landing page, you will be effectively creating a new site collection as happens with options (1) and (2)

In regards of the Site Manager, it allows to see your sites structure in a site collection but it does not allow to see other site collections

[#4]

Any idea when the change in functionality for that New Site link will occur?

[#5]

I would be interested to know that too

[#6]

@Juan Carlos González Martín - in terms of best practice I've seen a lot of material/courses on the web suggesting the structing of SharePoint data into subsites by, for example, department. It goes further and describes scenarios where you could have public and private websites per department so for example HR could have an internal/private site that holds content and documents that is secured in such a way that only they can see/edit it. Then they could have a public site where content and documents are made available to the entire organisation. 

A disciplinary action document would be stored in their private site, but a 'leave application document' would be stored in the public site. 

I don't think this is a bad approach considering it clearly defines the boundaries in terms of security. 

Bringing this back to Site Collections vs Sites. Would it be advisable to create a Site Collection for HR and have the two sites (private/public) in that Site Collection or would one rather just create an HR subsite under the main Teamsite and then two additional subsites under that one for public and private access? 

I think the reason why this line questioning came up for me is because of the SharePoint landing page and the fact that clicking that New Site button creates a new site instead of a Site Collection. It seemed to me that Microsoft was pushing the idea of keeping all new subsites under the root Site (whichever that was supposed to be), because if you didn't manage Site Collections from the Admin Center then ultimately you would end up with a hierarchy under the TeamSite. For me landing on the SharePoint landing page and clicking on Create Site should from the start have created a Site Collection then you could use Site Contents to add additional subsites under that. 

[#7]

I try to avoid making a site collection that looks like a company org chart because as soon as the Org changes (which typically happens at least once a year) then the SP users want the collection rearranged (which can be a significant effort).

External sharing is enabled at a site collection level, I like to have separate site collections for external collaboration.

[#8]

Your option 3 will create a subsite beneath the root site collection for your tenant, the site where the subsites are created can be changed in SharePoint Admin->Settings.

Another option against option 3 is to add your own app or form to create a site collection within the tenant using a SharePoint App, the app would require Tenant Full Control permissions, there are various samples for this in the OfficeDev PnP:

https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples
https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP-Partner-Pack/tree/master/OfficeDevPnP.PartnerPack.SiteProvisioning

To do this you would need to specify the new app URL in SharePoint Admin -> Settings. How you do this is up to you but you are constrained by the fact that the application will display in a SP dialog from the Create New button. You can use window.postMessage to resize this dialog from your application if required.

[#9]

I agree with yourself Dean, for a heavily managed and governed and limited usability business go down the manual site collections and thousands of sub-sites.

I much prefer the site collections for containers of data and a site directory if users don't want to use the SharePoint landing page.

This is a model I think needs to be following in Office 365 with each SharePoint site only getting 1 O365 group and with all the O365 services tied to groups.