SharePoint 2010 - Site Collections, Subsites, Top-Level Site

In this article I would like to experiment with Top Level Site creation. We need to use the Central Administration application to do this.

What is Site Collection?

A site collection is a group of web sites that have the same owner and share the same settings.

For example, a Document Site Collection can contain a Word Document Site and an Excel Document Site under it.

Please note that we should create a site collection inside a web application.

What is a Top Level Site?

A Site Collection can be divided into two:

1. Subsites
2. Top Level Site

Subsites are those sites under the site collection.

A Top Level site is a site not created under another site. A top level site can have subsites under it.

Note

All the contents of a site collection are stored inside the configured SQL Server database. We can add upto 15000 (configurable value) site collections inside the content database. Often the term sites is used to represent site collections.

Creating Site Collection

Now we can experiment with creating a site collection. Open the Central Administration web application through the start menu.

We are going to create a site collection for a group of Microsoft .Net users in the company.

Click on the Create site collections link as shown above. You will get the following screen.



Enter the details in the highlighted areas. The description of which is given below:

Item	Description
Web Application	Choose your web application.  By default there is only one web application.
Title	Title for your site collection, appears in browser
Description	Description of your site
Url	Enter the url suffix.  This url can be shared for the group of users.
User Name	The users who are allowed to access this site collection.  Use the Check Names option to auto complete the qualified user name after entering the user name.

On clicking the Ok button and waiting for a while the new site collection will get created. A message appears like shown below.



Click the Ok button to return to Central Administration.

Now you are ready with the new site collection. You can share the url between the intended users. On my machine the url was: http://appes-pc/my/personal/dotnet/default.aspx.

Opening the url in browser the following page was displayed.



Now the users of the site collection can create new sites inside this site collection. We can explore that in the next chapters.

References

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263094.aspx

Summary

In this article we have explored Site Collection Creation. Please note that an ordinary user do not have permission to create top level sites.