Best Practices

• The site collection administrator needs to understand the differences between creating a site collection, which is done from the Central Administrator site, and creating sites, which can be done in a variety of ways from within the site collection, and creating pages, which can also be done in a variety of ways from within sites and libraries.

• The Site Settings page contains myriad tools that the site collection and site administrators should be conversant with. The tools shown will vary based on the site collection features, site features enabled, and the version of SharePoint 2010 installed.

• A site collection administrator taking over an existing site collection should thoroughly review the subsites that exist in the site collection, as well as any managed paths that contain additional site collections. The Site Settings page offers the Sites and Workspaces link that shows subsites, document workspaces, and meeting workspaces, as well as the Site Hierarchy link that shows all subsites. However, the Site Collection List should be visited from the Central Admin site to see whether managed paths exist, which can contain additional site collections, each of which can have any number of subsites.

• Administrators should review which permission levels have the ability to create sites and workspaces in the environment. This is done by accessing Site Settings, Sites and Workspaces, and then clicking Site Creation Permissions. Also, Self-Service Site Creation settings should be checked from the Central Administration site, Security page, by clicking Configure Self-Service Site Creation.

• Another area a site collection administrator needs to be familiar with is the Users and Permissions section in the Site Settings page, and especially the Site Permissions interface, and the permissions that are granted by default to the standard SharePoint Groups, especially Owners, Members, and Visitors, because these are the most widely used groups.

• Variations are a powerful new feature that allow the site administrator to design an environment that automatically routes users to a specific site based on the language setting in IE. They are specifically designed for organizations supporting multiple languages but can be customized for other uses as well.

• Audience targeting allows farm administrators to create audiences and then compile them based on the rules created. A list or library then needs to have audience targeting enabled, and items in that list or library need to be assigned to one or more audiences. Then web parts added to a page, such as the home page, can use audiences to filter which files are displayed in that web part. Audiences do not affect the permissions of users to view or modify documents; they are simply filtering mechanisms.