“Site collection” and “Site”, I am lost !
… this is what I heard yesterday in a meeting.
To illustrate what it is and give my advice to the person who, I thought, was acting as the company’s SharePoint Administrator, I asked to see the Office 365 Admin Center and SharePoint Admin Center.
What was there: a dozen of size collections and all “pilot sites” that have been requested by a couple of teams to “play with SharePoint”, all of them where just under the Managed Path /Sites/ such as
- https://myorganisation.sharepoint.com/sites/teamtest
- https://myorganisation.sharepoint.com/sites/project%20abacus
- https://myorganisation.sharepoint.com/sites/joe%20smith
No no, sir ! Let’s go back to basics and understand why you would like to use a few Site Collections in your environment and where to put the sites.
It has been a few years that I am avoiding technical jargon with my clients because the person who previously only had to be the SharePoint Administrator is now also the head of IT Support, the Infrastructure Manager and oh, may be also managing the 500 staff mobile phones, so I get that they don’t have to remember every systems’ ins and outs.
I used the old analogy that we used to use for Windows Folders:
Would you create a new drawer each time you have a new colours of socks to put together, or would you just find more space within that drawer to add the new item?
Image courtesy: http://www.noteborn.com
“Site collection” would be your drawers, where you would put your “group of items’ in each one (granted, you may however have a very high commode of 20+ drawers, so build it wide!), and your “sites” would be your little compartments in each, to keep thing cleaner, neat and hum.. may be block access to some of them by having a little lock on it.
My user was happy with the explanation and actually was feeling sorry for the messy sites he created, not his fault I said, it’s not that obvious when the names are so similar.
Let’s demystify SharePoint and refer to it in plain English so that everybody gets it, shall we ?!