Working With Self Service Site Creation Feature In SharePoint 2016

In order to create a site collection in SharePoint, ideally, we have to head over to the central administration and select the ‘Create Site Collection’ option from Application Management. This requires the assistance of SharePoint Administrators.

In a large organization, this could be a time consuming process as the user will have to put a request to get it serviced by the administration team. However, to work around this problem, we can make use of SharePoint’s Self Service Site creation option. SharePoint Self-service site creation is a feature that enables end-users to create site collections in a web application on their own. Once Self Service Site creation is enabled, the users in the site will get a ‘new’ option in their ‘My Sites’ page, using which, a new site collection can be created.



Clicking on ‘new’ will open up the site collection creation page located at layouts folder (/_layouts/15/scsignup.aspx). On this page, we can add the required information Title, URL, site collection template which will be used to create the site collection.



Before we could get started with this feature, we have to enable Self Service Site creation. In this article, we will see how to do this using UI as well as through PowerShell.

Enable Self Service Site Creation from Central Administration

Head over to the "Manage Web Applications" page, select the specific web application, and click on ‘Self- Service Site Creation’ page.



This will open up the page where we can configure self-service site creation. By default, the feature is turned off and hidden from users in the UI.



Change the radio button to ‘On’ and select the option ‘Prompt users to create a team site under’. Also, mention the managed path under which the site collections will be created. I have mentioned it as “sites/SelfService”. You can also select the option ‘Prompt users to create a site collection under any managed path”. However, this would lead to a situation where users can create site collections randomly within the web application and over time, it can spin out of control. It is always better to restrict the users to create site collections under a specific managed path.



Moreover, ensure that there is a root site collection, already created in the web application, else we will get some unexpected errors when trying to create site collection using self-service feature. Now that the self-service site collection feature is configured, let’s head over to My Sites and try to create a new site collection using the newly activated feature.



The ‘new’ button has come up in ‘My Sites’. Click on it.



This will open up the self-service site creation dialog box where we can specify the new site collection name. It will be created under the already specified managed path (sites/SelfService).



Click on "Create" and it will start provisioning the site collection. We can also spin up the self-service site creation page by going to the URL “http://sharepoint2016/_layouts/15/scsignup.aspx”. Here, sharepoint2016 is my web application name.



Thus, a new site collection by the name ‘NewSite’ has been created.



Enable Self-Service Site creation through PowerShell

We can also enable the self-service site creation feature through PowerShell. Spin up the SharePoint 2016 Management Shell.



Run the below scripts in the PowerShell console.

$WebApp = Get-SPWebApplication "http://sharepoint2016"
$webApp.SelfServiceSiteCreationEnabled = $true
$webApp.Update()

This will enable the self-service site creation service in SharePoint 2016 web application.

Summary

Thus, we saw how to enable Self Service Site Creation feature in a web application in SharePoint Server 2016 through UI and PowerShell.