Beginning SharePoint® 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007

8.1. Understanding Sites and Site Collections

When a company haphazardly stores information, a system becomes people-dependent. You see an increase in storage locations, such as personal drives, network file shares, or removable media. Different people will catalog information using different methods, resulting in co-workers relying on each other to find information — a serious loss in productivity. When a company uses SharePoint to store, share, and collaborate in a central location, it becomes more dependent on an organizational system, and workers become more productive.

To help you tap into the organizational power of SharePoint, this section helps you understand what a site, site collection, and a workspace are, and shows you how to create a site collection of your own.

8.1.1. What Is a Site?

SharePoint organizes pages, lists, libraries, and other components into sites. Each site typically contains information with a common theme, such as an intranet site for a project team or an extranet site for collaboration with business partners. From a web browser perspective, a SharePoint site is simply a website.

By gathering related information in SharePoint sites, organizations can adopt consistent procedures and practices concerning content management. Users no longer have to wait for others to supply them with "inside information" such as the location of shared files. Instead, information access becomes more "self serve," resulting in more efficient work patterns.

8.1.2. What ...