HOUR 5
Planning a Site’s Structure
What You’ll Learn in This Hour
What sites are
Creating a site
Templates used to create a site
Which site to use for which situation
The site is the basis of all SharePoint installations. You can have one or more sites, and they can be of different types and provide different looks and functions. This hour concentrates entirely on what they are and how to create them, as well as when to use the different kinds of sites.
Basic Information About Sites
Before we can start thinking about a site’s structure and contents, we first need to know more about sites in general. Our standard installation of SPF 2010 created two sites: a “normal” one (http://spf1) and a “special” one (http://spf1:41170).
The normal site isn’t used for any particular purpose and can have subsites. The special site administrates the entire SPF 2010 system using routines provided by Microsoft as part of the software package. This site doesn’t include a function for creating a subsite.
SPS 2010, on the other hand, has a few special sites. The one you are most likely to come across in books and the Internet is MySite.
MySite is a site that all users can define for themselves (if not blocked by the administrator). Its dual role is to be a personal page containing information that the user wants to make available to others and a more personal page that the user uses as his usual entry to the system and that contains the information that the user wants to see personally.
Here are a few, often confusing, terms that you will come across:
Web application—Any Windows Internet Information Services (IIS) website in the SharePoint system (here, for instance, the default site).
Top-level site—A site that is at the top of a site plus subsite structure (even if there are no subsites).
Site collection—A set of sites and subsites. There are exceptions to this definition. For example, the Central Administration site is regarded as a site collection even though it has no subsites.
Creating a Site
In this section, you create a subsite to our default site to see what different kinds of sites can be created. The following steps show you how to create a Meeting Workspace site:
1. Start with the default page. (Refer to Figure 2.10 if you can’t remember the original look of this). Select Site Actions and then New Site from the drop-down list (see Figure 5.1).
2. After clicking New Site there’s a page where information about the name, URL, and what kind of site is to be created needs to be completed. Figure 5.2 shows part of that page. Fill in the three sections that I have added text to but do not press Create after doing so.
The reason you shouldn’t yet click Create is that if you do the type of site that will be created will be a Team Site, which is the default type of site (and the most widely used). Here we want to create a Meeting Workspace site.
Figure 5.3 shows what options are available if the Meetings column head is clicked.
FIGURE 5.1 The default site showing the Site Actions dropdown
FIGURE 5.2 First steps in creating a site
It is pure chance that there are five different options here and five different options in the Collaboration column, so don’t attempt to compare like with like in any way based on position in the respective columns.
Behind each entry in a column is something called a site template. A template will be defined later in the hour; for now, just note this as a term that is used. The ones listed at the moment have been created in advance by Microsoft and were installed as part of the SPF 2010 installation routine. Each site template has its own (different) set of functions.
FIGURE 5.3 Meeting sites
3. Select the standard Basic Meeting Workspace and click Create. Figure 5.4 shows the newly created Meeting Workspace subsite called “BookSite1.”
FIGURE 5.4 Meeting Work-space–BookSite1
What you can see in this site’s page is covered in the next hour. In this hour, we concentrate on sites and workspaces.
We’ve already had an example of using a template that wasn’t the default “Team Site” template. The next section looks more closely at templates.
Using Templates
A template is a ready-made set of code that is used to create a site. The code contains both a look (site design, colors, fonts) and a feel (what functions are available to use in connection with the site).
In addition to Microsoft providing templates, it’s possible to create new templates and have them appear either under the existing Collaboration and Meetings group names or under a group name that we specify.
Typically, templates aren’t created from scratch. Instead, they are generally created by amending a site that was created with a standard template and then using the Save As Template function to create a new template with a different name.
Let’s walk through an example of creating a new template from a site that uses a standard template. Here, we change the color of a site. In this case we use the Meeting Workspace called BookSite1.
1. Select Site Actions (see Figure 5.4) and then (at the bottom of the drop-down list) Site Settings (see Figure 5.5).
2. Select Site Theme in the Look and Feel section (as shown in Figure 5.5).
3. Select Berry from the list of options (as shown in Figure 5.6).
4. Click Apply.
Now you have a page that looks like Figure 5.5 but is horribly garish with a purple top horizontal section and a large, bright yellow section below (and links are in a different color). I chose this Theme because it is so terrible looking that we won’t have any difficulty in recognizing it. I don’t recommend it for real-life sites.
Let’s make another change to the site before we save it as a template.
FIGURE 5.6 Selecting the Berry Theme
In Figure 5.5 (or rather the garish purple/yellow version you have in front of you), perform the following steps:
1. Click Regional Settings under Site Administration.
2. Fill in something different then the original English (U.S.) here (see Figure 5.7). I selected Finnish, which automatically gave a 24-hour clock.
FIGURE 5.7 Specifying different regional settings
3. Click OK.
4. Click BookSite1 (in the large “breadcrumb” at the top of the page) and then on Add New Document, which is under the Document Library section at the right of the site’s main page (see Figure 5.8).
FIGURE 5.8 Adding a file to a Document Library
5. Browse for a .txt file (and text file, we’re interested in the date) and add it with OK.
Figure 5.9 shows the revised default page for the BookSite1. (There are no dates here so we can’t yet see that this site is using a 24-hour clock and non-U.S. date format).
FIGURE 5.9 A revised default page for BookSite1
6. Click Document Library.
Now in Figure 5.10, we can see a Finnish date format (2.12.2009) and a 24-hour clock (18:13) rather than the 12-hour clock of the U.S. settings that we would have seen if we had uploaded the same file to the default site.
FIGURE 5.10 Finnish Date Format and light purple links
With these two changes—Themes and Regional Settings—it’s time to save a copy of the revised site as a template. Here are the steps for that:
1. Click BookSite1 in the “breadcrumbs” at the top-left part of the screen.
2. Select Site Actions and Site Settings.
3. This time (you are again at Figure 5.5), click Save Site as Template in the center of the screen; save the template and call it GarishYellow (see Figure 5.11).
4. Click OK (see Figure 5.12).
FIGURE 5.11 Saving a GarishYellow template
FIGURE 5.12 The site template has been stored in the User Solution Gallery.
Now that we have saved a site template that includes our two changes (Theme and Regional Settings), we can create a second site called BookSite2 that includes those changes with no additional actions needed on our part. To do this, repeat the steps from earlier in this hour, which were as follows:
1. Go to the default site (Team Site). (There are several ways to do this, one being the Navigate Up button to the left of the Browse tab. Note that the Edit tab is between them if you are logged in as Administrator.)
2. Click Site Actions and then New Site in the drop-down list.
3. Everything is entered as before (replacing BookSite1 with BookSite2 of course), but at the bottom of the screen, you see an additional column called Custom (see Figure 5.13).
FIGURE 5.13 An additional Custom column
4. Click Custom.
5. Click GarishYellow, which should be the only entry in that column.
6. Click Create (at the bottom of the page).
Now that you have created a new site, you can check if it has those purple and bright yellow bands, and if you want you can upload a document to the document library as before to check the date and time format.
So now we know that if we want to have a standard look for sites that is different from the look provided by Microsoft, we can do it. Later in the book, we make more comprehensive changes to the look of a site.
Designing Your Site
When creating a site, you have choices. You can choose where to put the site and what kind of site it is.
Creating a Blog or Meeting Site
There are standard templates for blogs, or meetings, so if you want to create one of these types of sites you normally use the standard template provided for them. In each case we have the choice between creating our new site as a subsite to the default site or creating a new top-level site.
For blogs (see Hour 12, “Using Wikis and Blogs”), there’s normally no point in having them under the default site in the site structure, so just create a new site. For a meeting site, that could be part of the site structure. If you think it is, create it under the default site.
Always think about why you’re creating the site and make it a new site or a site within the existing site structure accordingly. Don’t delete the default site. People who do tend to get problems later. Just ignore it if you aren’t using it.
Creating a Site for Your Sports Club
Generally, this is going to be an information site. Therefore, you need to choose the Team Site template. In this case, however, because the default site is already a team site, there’s no need to create any new sites. Instead, you can just use the default site.
Note the warning about the cost of connecting to the Internet in the “Q&A” section at the end!
Let’s close this section on private sites with a couple of thoughts about access rights. When you create a top-level site, you can decide whether anyone can access it (anonymous), or whether you will restrict it to particular users (and which rights they will have). You’ll remember that we already created a cross-section of users with different access rights and added them to the site.
When you create a subsite, the default choice is that whoever can access the top-level site (or because subsites aren’t necessarily only at level two in a structure, the site above the subsite) can also access the subsite with the same rights. This is known as inheriting permissions. The other choice is to not inherit permissions, meaning that no one can access the site until you specifically grant that person access rights on that site.
Now suppose we have our Sport’s site and we let everyone access that, but we also want to keep some things private, such as finances. One way is to create a subsite that doesn’t inherit permissions and then specify individually those few people who can access and amend that information.
Another way is to create a SharePoint group with standard Contribute rights and then make the finance committee members of that SharePoint group. Then give the group access rights to the subsite. Then when the committee changes, just replace some of the members of that SharePoint group.
Creating a Site for Your Company
With company sites, the main choice is likely to be between a single site (no doubt the default site) with a subsite structure and several different top-level sites (probably also with a subsite structure). The main considerations here are administration needs, the size of those sites, and perhaps even the number of top-level sites the design requires.
You potentially have increased administration needs because the various settings are specified for an entire site collection. If you don’t want to have the same settings for all your sites, you must have different site collections (that is, different top-level sites).
The size of those sites is important for backups and restores (for which the size of the content database is important). Each site collection must be contained in a single content database. Therefore, if you have a lot of sites with a lot of data, you might need to use different site collections (which can have their own content databases) to keep the sizes reasonable.
What is reasonable? It’s difficult to say, but today more than 200GB is considered unreasonable (a couple of years ago, that figure was 50GB).
Finally, it’s not advisable to have more than roughly 50 site collections. So, if you are thinking about using a site collection for each subsidiary and you have more than 40 subsidiary companies today, think again. Instead group your subsidiaries together with one group of companies per site collection.
Summary
This hour covered different sites. It showed how to create sites and amend their look. From this new-look site, a template was created from which new sites could be generated.
The hour concluded with a brief look at which kinds of sites are suitable for common private and work areas.
Q&A
Q. What is the difference between sites and workspaces?
A. There isn’t one. Workspaces are sites, too. The difference is probably historical.
Originally, there were only sites. Then, in SharePoint version 2 products, it became possible to create sites from Office 2003 products (and not just in the browser). Such sites were called document workspaces (connected to Excel, PowerPoint, Word) and meeting workplaces (connected to Outlook).
In present versions of SharePoint, both kinds are called workspaces, even though the meeting workspaces are sufficiently different to justify their own type button.
Q. I want to connect my private website using SPF 2010 to the Internet. Can I just do it?
A. No. Connecting to the Internet involves licensing costs. These costs could drive you to using a commercial web host for your site. If you run SPF 2010, an Internet connection license for the server costs a few thousand dollars. This is on top of the normal licensing requirement for the operating system used on the server (and database licensing costs if a full SQL Server product is used).
Workshop
Quiz
1. What are the two main groupings of site templates?
2. How does the Site Settings page change after a subsite has been created?
3. Can we create our own company look and duplicate it?
Answers
1. Collaboration and Meetings.
2. There are more options in the Site Collection Administration Column after sub-sites have been created.
3. Yes. One way is to make changes to an existing site, save the result as a template, and then use that newly created template when creating all future sites.