Creating a Site Collection

In many environments, the site collection administrator is also a farm administrator, and will need to know how to create site collections. Although some organizations use a single site collection for all of their needs, a best practice is to create separate site collections for groups that will be saving a large amount of data (50GB to 100GB or more) and creating a content database for each of those site collections. Although this is not a universal rule, by creating multiple content databases, SQL Server will be managing more databases that are smaller in size, which can be advantageous when designing disaster recovery strategies and service level agreements.

In addition, as discussed in the following sections, a large number of tools are available for each site collection; these allow customization of one site collection that won’t affect other site collections. For example, Site Collection Features can be turned on for features such as Document ID Service, Document Sets, or PerformancePoint Services features that will be available only to sites contained within the site collection.

To create a site collection from the Central Administration site, simply follow these steps:

1. From the Central Administration home page, click Create Site Collection in the Application Management section.
2. From the createsite.aspx page, enter a title for the site (Dept X Site Collection, for this example), optionally enter a description, and provide a URL for the site collection (in this example, select /sites/ from the drop-down menu and enter Dept X for the site collection name). Choose the Team Site template. An example is shown in Figure 21.2.

   Figure 21.2. CreateSite.aspx page from the Central Administrator site.

   

3. Scroll down on the page, and enter a primary site collection administrator and secondary site administrator (abcadministrator and abcuser1 in this example). Click the Check Names icon next to the fields to make sure the usernames were entered properly. Leave the quota template selection to No Quota. Click OK.
4. After the site has been created, the Top-Level Site Successfully Created Page (sitecreated.aspx) will display, and will include a link to the new site collection. Click the link to view the new site collection. Figure 21.3 shows the site created in this example.

   Figure 21.3. Home page of a New Team Site site collection.

   

5. Access the drop-down menu for Site Actions and click Site Settings. Figure 21.4 shows the Site Settings page for the new site collection. A sampling of the different tools will be covered in the following sections.

   Figure 21.4. Site Settings page for a New Team Site site collection.