Beginning SharePoint 2013: Building Business Solutions

Chapter 8

Working with Sites

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• The difference between sites and site collections
• How to manage the structure of a site
• Out-of-the-box templates and when to use them
• How to create a custom template based on an existing site

So far this book has covered many of the different components that can be included within a SharePoint site. This chapter is dedicated to understanding the container that you are building the objects within, and you look at several key concepts that should help you pull all the pieces together. This chapter also looks at the creation process for new site collections and sites, and provides you with the information on when to create each one.

UNDERSTANDING SITES AND SITE COLLECTIONS

When an organization stores information in a disorganized or haphazard manner, systems become difficult to navigate and information difficult to find. An increase in storage locations results, such as personal drives, network file shares, or removable media. Different people catalog information using different methods, which leads to co-workers relying on each other to find information, which leads to a serious loss in productivity. SharePoint introduces great potential at addressing challenges that businesses face with respect to how content is organized and subsequently located. However, it is still important to apply good design principles when configuring your SharePoint environment. A key aspect of doing so is to understand the various containers ...