A site collection is a set of Web sites that can have the same
owner and share administration settings. Each site collection contains a
top-level Web site and can contain one or more subsites.
Before creating a site from the SharePoint Central Administration
Web site, you must create a site collection. Subsites are created within
top-level sites and subsites, and they cannot be created within Central
Administration.
Web sites on SharePoint Web applications are organized into site
collections. Each site collection has a top-level Web site. This top-level Web
site can have multiple subsites, and each subsite can have multiple subsites,
for as many levels as required. When you create a site collection, a top-level
site is automatically created. Each site collection can have only a single
top-level site.
The hierarchy of top-level sites and subsites enables, for
example, users to have a main working site for a team or division, plus
individual working sites or shared sites for projects. Top-level Web sites and
subsites allow different levels of control over the features and settings for
sites. The administrator of a site collection can control settings and features
for both the top-level Web site and any subsites beneath it. For example, in
addition to the standard administration tasks for any site, an administrator of
a site collection can perform the following tasks.
View
usage statistics and storage space allocation.
Manage
the site collection Recycle Bin.
Manage
Web Part, template, and workflow galleries.
Manage
the features that are available in the site collection.
Configure
settings, such as regional settings, for the top-level Web site and all
subsites.
The
administrator of a subsite can control settings and features for only that
subsite, and the administrator of the next subsite below can control settings
and features for only that subsite. For example, an administrator of a subsite
can perform the following tasks:
Add,
delete, or change user permissions, if unique permissions have been set.
View
usage analysis data.
Change
regional settings.
Manage
the master page, site content type, and site columns galleries.
Manage
Web discussions and alerts.
Change
the site name and description, theme, and home page organization.
You
can view the site collections and their subsites from Central Administration.
To manage the site collections, you must be a member of the Farm Administrators
group. Similarly, to manage the subsites within a site collection, you must be
a member of the Site Owners group.
A
site collection is a hierarchy of sites. When a site collection is created, a
top-level site is created within that site collection. The top-level site can
contain one or more subsites.
You
can create a site collection that is based on an existing Web application, or
you can create a Web application. For information about how to create a Web
application, see Create or extend a Web application (Office SharePoint Server).
If
your application is small, you should use a single site collection to avoid the
overhead of managing multiple sites. However, for complex solutions, having
multiple site collections makes it easier to organize the complex content
within multiple sites.
At
the site collection level, permissions and navigation are isolated in the
following ways:
Subsites
within a site collection can inherit permissions from the top-level site.
Site
collections cannot inherit permissions from other site collections.
There
is no built-in navigation from one site collection to another.
You
should specify a secondary site collection administrator for the new site collection.
You
must be a member of the Farm Administrators SharePoint group to complete this
procedure.
