Controlling Who Can Create Sites

Another recommended step to take for site administrators for new or existing site collections is to take a few minutes and review who has the ability to create sites. By default, only users with full control permissions in the site collection have the ability to create subsites (including document workspaces and meeting workspaces), which only include site collection administrators and members of the Owners group for the site collection. However, other permission levels may be able to create sites, which can be a good thing, if the organization wants to encourage the use of document workspaces and meeting workspaces and empower more users to build sites for collaboration purposes. Or it can be a bad thing and lead to an accumulation of sites and workspaces that users may abandon, or that may confuse users.

The Sites and Workspaces page discussed in the previous section provides a link for Site Creation Permissions. By clicking this link, the administrator can provide site and workspace creation permissions to different permission levels, as shown in Figure 21.9. From this page, the administrator can check the boxes next to permission levels such as design or contribute, and by clicking OK will add the Create Subsites site permission for that permission level.

Figure 21.9. Site and Workspace Creation Permissions page.

Another important tool to know about is the Self-Service Site Collection Management tool. This tool is accessed from the Central Administration site by clicking the Security link in the Quick Launch area and then clicking Configure Self-Service Site Creation in the General Security section. From this page, shown in Figure 21.10, the farm administrator can enable or disable Self-Service Site Creation, and can require a secondary contact be supplied during the site creation process in case the primary contact leaves the company or is not available in the future. Figure 21.11 shows the announcement created when this is enabled, which provides a link to the _layouts/scssignup.aspx page where users can create new sites.

Figure 21.10. Self-Service Site Creation page.

Figure 21.11. Self-service site creation announcement with link.