SharePoint Site Collection and Site Recommendations
Site Collection
There are quite a few things to learn and understand about Site Collections. What follows are a few key
aspects.
What is it?
A SharePoint site collection is a hierarchical set of sites that can be managed together. Sites within a site
collection have common features, such as shared permissions, galleries for templates, content types,
and Web Parts, and they often share a common navigation. A site collection contains a single top-level
site, and any number of subsites organized in a hierarchy.
The site collection is typically created using one of the out of the box SharePoint site templates for the
root site that is provisioned with it. The following are the available templates for a site collection (out of
the box).
Tip: The template you choose for your site collection impacts what the site collection contains when it is
provisioned. It’s always a good idea to select a template that closely matches the default content,
components and settings you desire.
Site Collection Root Site Templates
 Collaboration Site Templates
There are a number of site templates that come with SharePoint that are designed to support
collaboration based activities with default content.
o Blank Site (Only Available Through Powershell To Administrators)
Create a blank site if you want nothing provisioned within the site. This is the best
template to use when restoring or importing content from a previous source.
o Team Site
Create this kind of site for teams to quickly organize, author, and share information. It
provides a document library, and lists for managing announcements, calendar items,
tasks, and discussions.
o
Blog
Create this kind of site for a person or team to post ideas, observations, and expertise
that site visitors can comment on.
o
Developer Site
Create this kind of site for developers to build, test and publish apps for Office.
o
Project Site
Create a project site to manage and collaborate on a project. Creating a site with this
template brings all status, communication, and artifacts relevant to the project into one
place.
o
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Community Site
Create this kind of site when you need a place where community members can discuss
topics of common interest. Members can browse and discover relevant content by
exploring categories, sorting discussions by popularity or by viewing only posts that have
a best reply. Members gain reputation points by participating in the community, such as
starting discussions and replying to them, liking posts and specifying best replies.
Enterprise Site Templates
o
Document Center
A site to centrally manage documents in your enterprise.
o
eDiscovery Center
This site is used to manage, search and export content for investigations matters. While
it can also help teams collaborate during the investigation and keep track of cases, its
focus should be on the eDiscovery capabilities/coordination opportunity it provides.
o
Records Center
This template creates a site designed for records management. Records managers can
configure the routing table to direct incoming files to specific locations. The site also lets
you manage whether records can be deleted or modified after they are added to the
repository.
o
Business Intelligence Center
The Business Intelligence Center gives you a central location to store items, such as
reports and dashboards. When you enable Excel Services and PerformancePoint
Services, you will already have a location to store reports and dashboard content.
o
Enterprise Search Center
This site delivers an enterprise search experience. Users can access the enterprise
search center to perform general searches, people searches, conversation or video
searches, all in one place. You can easily customize search results pages.
o
My Site Host
A site used for hosting personal sites (My Sites) and the public People Profile page. This
template needs to be provisioned only once per User Profile Service Application.

o
Community Portal
This site is used for discovering new communities across the enterprise.
o
Basic Search Center
A site for delivering the search experience. The site includes pages for search results and
advanced searches.
o
Visio Process Repository
Create a Visio process repository site for teams to quickly view, share, and store Visio
process diagrams. It provides a versioned document library for storing process diagrams,
and lists for managing announcements, tasks, and review discussions.
Publishing Site Templates
o Publishing Portal
A starter site hierarchy for an Internet-facing site or a large intranet portal. This site can
be customized easily with distinctive branding. It includes a home page, a sample press
releases subsite, a Search Center, and a login page. Typically, this site has many more
readers than contributors, and it is used to publish Web pages with approval workflows.
o
Enterprise Wiki
A site for publishing knowledge that you capture and want to share across the
enterprise. It provides an easy content editing experience in a single location for coauthoring content, discussions, and project management.
o
Product Catalog
This site is used for managing product catalogs.
Note: Some of the above templates are not available in Foundation or Standard.
Why would you use one?
There are many reasons why you might chose to create a site collection in SharePoint.
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For Security Management Benefits:
Every site collection creates a security boundary between one collection of sites and another
collection of sites. Each site collection has its own collection of SharePoint groups and ACL
references.
For Privacy or Management Benefits and Different Site Collection Administrators
Each site collection has a role of “Site Collection Administrator” and a person or more assigned
to that role. There are times when either for privacy/confidentiality reasons you cannot have a
specific site collection administrator with the rights to see that sites content, or where you have
different people that should be assigned to manage that collection of sites. The second is an
extremely common scenario in large enterprise organizations where there is a need to distribute
the technical ownership of site collection administration.
For Search Separation
For Workflow Separation
To Impose Specific Storage Quotas
With SharePoint Site Collections you can define specific storage quotas and email warnings to
notify users when they are approaching a defined threshold on their site collection storage.

To Impose Specific Sandbox Quotas
With a SharePoint Site Collection you can define the maximum number of points sandbox
solutions can use per day. Additionally you can also configure an email warning when storage
exceeds a certain number of points.
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So Your Site Collection Does Not Have The Same Active (or Inactive) Site Collection Features
There are many times when this comes in handy. In SharePoint 2010 there are quite a few Site
Collection level features you may not want active on specific site collections.
To Have a Separate Help Library to Store Custom Help
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Why wouldn’t you use one?
If the above benefits aren’t a requirement than it is almost always better to not create a separate site
collection. That way you don’t have the added management of many of those factors, the additional
complications of webparts being constrained to one site collection and easier navigation.
Site (or Subsite)
There are quite a few things to learn and understand about SharePoint sites or subsites. What follows
are a few key aspects.
What is it?
A subsite is a single SharePoint site within a site collection. A subsite can inherit permissions and
navigation structure from its parent site or these can be specified and managed independently. Creation
of subsites can be delegated to users of a site collection, but creation of site collections must be
performed by a service administrator.
Typically within an organization you will create additional site templates over time. These are often built
based on the out of the box site templates. What follows is an outline of each of the out of the box site
templates and when I think they should be used.
Site Template
Category
When should you use it?
Team Site
Collaboration
A site that automatically creates a shared documents
library, site pages library, an announcements list, a
calendar, a task list, and a team discussion list.
The most popular template for unstructured or semi
structured collaboration sites and excellent for
getting people started quickly. However you should
be cautious choosing this site when you need page
management or publishing features as it would be
better to provision a publishing site and then the
lists/libraries necessary as it ensures only one pages
library will exist (versus two if the feature is activated
after on this site).
Blog
Collaboration
An excellent site for housing news articles, lengthier
announcements, a personal blog, or even a team
blog.
Project Site
Collaboration
This site template is used for managing and
collaborating on a project. Project
site coordinates project status and all additional
information relevant to the project.
Community Site
Collaboration
A site where the community members can explore,
discover content and discuss common topics. This site
revolves around discussion topics and acts like a
forum.
Document Center
Enterprise
When you use the template, the resulting site is
optimized for creating, using, and storing large
numbers of documents. A Document Center site
provides features for creating and managing large
sets of documents. The Document Center site
template has the recommended document
management features enabled by default.
The features it enabled by default are:
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Document ID Service
Metadata Navigation and Filtering
Default Webparts (Newest Documents,
Modified By Me, and Highest Rated
Documents)
eDiscovery Center
Enterprise
This site is used to manage, search and export
content for investigations matters. While it can also
help teams collaborate during the investigation and
keep track of cases, its focus should be on the
eDiscovery capabilities/coordination opportunity it
provides.
Records Center
Enterprise
This site is used to submit and find important
documents that should be stored for long-term
archival.
This site should only be used when creating a read
only based archive or ‘records repository’ which will
route incoming files to specific locations within the
site. Sometimes multiple record center sites are
necessary depending on the file plan, and disposition
policies being enforced within your organization,
however just like multiple search centers it should be
avoided when possible.
Enterprise Search Center
Enterprise
When you need a search site with multiple pages for
results, searches, advanced searches, and easy
navigation between those search pages.
Basic Search Center
Enterprise
Only use this site template when the enterprise
search center is unavailable.
Note: You should only have one search center site
unless you have very specific search needs. (As the
search webparts can live on other pages, but the
search center represents a central search area.)
Publishing Site
Publishing
When you have a strong need for managed pages,
distributed publishing of page content, and more
pages based content management needs this is a
good template to use. It provisions a site that has the
publishing features already activated and simplifies
the number of libraries/lists so that by default only
basic ones are enabled (which publishing relies
upon).
Using advanced page management features like page
layouts requires that publishing be activated, so if
you are planning on using consistent page layouts, or
many page layouts this is probably a good template
to start with versus the less structured team site
templates.
Publishing Site with
Workflow
Publishing
Whenever any site is created using the ‘Publishing
Site With Workflow’ template it will have the
‘approval’ workflow activated. You would create one
for the same reason you would create a publishing
site, except in this one you want a much more
rigorous publishing process.
This allows for page scheduling, due dates, and more.
It requires a minimum of 6 clicks to publish a page for
a user.
Enterprise Wiki
Publishing
A site specifically designed to simplify the process for
creating and provisioning a new wiki. The most
common starting wiki for organizations is an
“Acronym Wiki” which houses many key acronyms
for the organization and references the acronyms
meaning, usage, useful policies, procedures, teams,
contacts, and more within the organization.