Creating site collections

Site collections are a logical container for a hierarchy of sites which gives the scope for administrative previlages, authentication and authorization, design and restore and backup operations to the sites in the collection.

The motivation for creating site collection with respect to administrative previlages is that the sites hierarchy within the site collection will have the same administrative rights. For e.g. the IT department guy gives administrative previlages to the Business person for Business Department site collection. The business person as an administrator can create and assign roles, users and groups to access sites. Also authorize the users against the content in the sites such as documents, lists and libraries. Hence for the sales department the administrative previlages will be to the person in sales department for the sales department site collection. Therefore isolating administrative previlages among site collections.

The second motivation for creating site collections is authentication and authorization for users and groups. The users as a member of one site collection are independent of the other site collection. A user in one site collection has to do nothing with authorization on content of other site collection. Even if that user is an administrator of one site collection and has authorization over all site hierarchy content withiin its own site collection by default it will not have any previlage on sites in the other site collection.

The third motivation for creating site lists would be the restore and backup operations that can be scheduled for site collections.

The fourth motivation for creating site collections are site elements and custom queries. The WSS object model provides the means to create custom queries that span all the lists within the site collection. Users can also create various custom site elements that can be used accros the site collections.