Chapter 6
Site Collection Administration Settings
Individual web sites are the main context, through which most people experience and think about SharePoint. A site is a visible part of the portal and is easy to understand. A site collection, on the other hand, is an abstract administrative entity. In this lesson we discuss the purpose of the site collection and cover some of the administrative options available at the site collection level. Many of the site collection administrative options not covered in this lesson, such as search settings, are covered in other lessons.
Defining Site Collections
A site collection is a group of individual SharePoint sites, grouped together to form a major administrative boundary. A lot of SharePoint features and functions are designed to work across sites but not across site collections. This boundary allows for different settings and configurations for groups of sites that have a clearly separate purpose. Site collections can be created at the farm level by farm administrators or, if the Configure Self-Service Site Creation option has been enabled by the farm administrator, site collections can be created by end users. The Configure Self-Service Site Creation option can be enabled in the Central Administration website in the Site Collections heading in the Application Management section of Central Administration.
Each site collection has a top-level site, also known as a root site. On the settings page of this site you'll find the site collection ...
