Plan for collaboration sites

  • Article

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

In this article:

  • About collaboration sites

  • Determine number of collaboration sites

  • Specific paths

  • Additional paths

  • Worksheet

About collaboration sites

With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, you have the ability to support collaboration sites in your environment. These sites do not need to be associated with a particular portal site collection or part of a publishing site collection. They can be stand-alone sites, available for teams or groups of users that need to collaborate on projects or share information, for either a short or a long period of time. For example, a team at an engineering firm might want a collaboration site to discuss current project status, assign tasks, or arrange group lunches, without having this internal information published to the corporate intranet.

Collaboration sites can be made available for searching from your portal or publishing site, so that information from these sites is not lost to your organization. However, for easier data recovery and maintenance, collaboration sites should be hosted either on a separate Web application or in separate content databases in the same Web application as your portal or publishing site.

You can create these sites for your users, or you can allow the users to create these sites on their own. For more information about planning site creation, see Plan process for creating sites (Office SharePoint Server).

Determine number of collaboration sites

Estimate approximately how many collaboration sites to expect in your environment, and how many such sites you are willing to support. If you require users to request a collaboration site, you can control how many are created. If you allow users to create their own collaboration sites, you will have many of these sites in your environment.

Specific paths

You have the ability to use specific paths in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to contain your SharePoint site collections, similar to the way that folders contain files or documents in the file system. By default, when you create a Web application, two paths are created for you:

  • Root path (/)   This is an explicit inclusion that can contain one site collection. For example, if you want a URL to appear as http://company_name/default.aspx, you would create the site collection at this root path.

  • Sites path (/sites)   This is a wildcard inclusion that can contain many site collections. For example, when you use the /sites path, the URL for a site named Site_A would be similar to http://server_name/sites/Site_A/default.aspx.

    Note

    The name of the /sites path varies depending on the installation language.

Additional paths

You can also create additional paths, allowing you to group site collections. Then, when you create a site collection, you can choose to:

  • Create the site collection at the root of the Web application (if no site collection has already been created there).

  • Create the site collection under the /sites path.

  • Create the site collection under any additional paths that have been made available for that Web application.

In general, the /sites path should be sufficient for most installations. However, consider using other paths for the following situations:

  • You have a complex installation and anticipate having a large number of site collections, and you want to group similar sites together. For example, you could use /personal for individual user sites and /team for group collaboration sites, rather than using /sites for all.

  • You want to be able to add a filter to your firewall or router to constrain a specific namespace to internal access only. For example, you could expose the /team path for external collaboration but not /personal.

Worksheet

Use the following worksheet when you determine paths for sites:

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