Technically, there are two other ways to organize SharePoint that are higher level than site collections: web applications and farms. Web applications can be used to add administrative security boundaries. SharePoint farms can contain multiple SharePoint servers, each of which can have specific functions within the farm—for example, indexing content for search or serving pages to end users.

Historically, SharePoint farms have been freely customized. However, when Microsoft Vice President Jeff Teper introduced the SharePoint 2013 Preview, he encouraged organizations to use the out-of-the-box functionality. In the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=1012), he wrote, “Use SharePoint as an out-of-box application whenever possible … we designed the new SharePoint UI to be clean, simple and fast and work great out-of-box. We encourage you not to modify it which could add complexity, performance and upgradeability and to focus your energy on working with users and groups to understand how to use SharePoint to improve productivity and collaboration and identifying and promoting best practices in your organization.”

Although the site template descriptions are available in the UI, going through all the categories—as I have for the book—and looking up the descriptions for each one is not exactly a quick exercise (especially when some of the descriptions are only visible as tooltips). I’ve included the descriptions here to make them readily accessible. In some cases, the description from SharePoint 2010 was more detailed, and I’ve included both the old and the new descriptions.

The Team Site template is one of the most popular site templates—if not the most popular—because it provides a good base of functionality for collaborating on a project.

SharePoint administration options are security trimmed, so if you do not have sufficient rights, you will not see some configuration options.

You can also manage web parts here. For example, you can upload web parts you may have created or acquired elsewhere.

There are third-party SharePoint management tools that will let you convert lists or sites to a new template. This can be useful when you upgrade to a new version of SharePoint and want to migrate your content to a template that offers new or more appropriate functionality.

You cannot delete a top-level site from the Site Content and Structure interface.

You can add visible drop-down menus to each column that allows filtering by adding ?Filter=1 to the URL of a list. This allows you to see at a glance which columns are available for filtering. For example, http://sp2013/_layouts/15/start.aspx#/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx would become http://sp2013/_layouts/15/start.aspx#/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx?Filter=1.

App parts are much the same as web parts, but unlike web parts, they are used by developers to create the user interface for SharePoint apps. In other words, an app part allows a SharePoint user to interact with a SharePoint app.

It is paramount to think of the SharePoint site Recycle Bin as a last resort. Items within SharePoint’s site Recycle Bin are emptied after 30 days, so there is no guarantee that your deleted content will be there when you realize that you need it back. There is another Recycle Bin that administrators can access, but that Recycle Bin has rules about how much data to store, so you can ask, but you might not be able to get your content back from that bin either.

Although it is possible to assign permissions to SharePoint items, it is generally not considered to be a good idea. Once you start using permissions other than at the site level, it becomes vastly more difficult to manage and track the permissions of each user.

It is almost always a good idea to avoid using spaces in a URL. Spaces in URLs are nasty because browsers convert each space to “%20”—the ASCII representation of a space—which uses three characters instead of one, and also makes the URL far less human-readable.