Getting ready

This recipe works for:

You will need a SharePoint site where you want to create your Team Site.

You will need the Full Control permission level to run this recipe. Normally this will mean that you are a member of the site owner's group.

How to do it...

How it works...

One of the key capabilities of SharePoint 2010 is that it allows you to quickly and easily create websites without needing input from the IT department or knowledge of website programming. Each version of the product ships with a set of reusable site templates. These templates can be used to create sites that contain different combinations of pre-created lists, libraries, web parts, and pages designed to perform specific business functions. SharePoint provides site templates for collaboration, communication, web publishing, managing meetings, search, blogs, wikis, business intelligence dashboards, My Sites, and more. These templates can then be augmented with custom site templates developed by SharePoint developers and by your own SharePoint power users.

To create a site, simply select the template that you want to use, provide some basic information, click on Create, and let SharePoint do the rest.

As you get more familiar with creating sites, you may want to have a look at the More Options button in the create dialog. This simply allows you to provide a few more settings specific to your site template as you create it. It is just a timesaver; anything you set here can be adjusted and changed later if you need to.

There's more...

Understanding the different types of sites that SharePoint provides is critical to getting the most value out of the product. Too often I see customers wasting time and money trying to reinvent sites that already exist!

Some of the more commonly used site templates are listed as follows:

Sites versus Site Collections

As you learn more about SharePoint, you will hear people talk about Sites and Site Collections. For the user it can often be confusing to try and understand the difference between the two. That is because everything you see and interact with is a site—there is nothing to see for a Site Collection. It is just a "collection of sites" that SharePoint can treat as a single unit, applying specific settings, security, databases, backup, administration rights, and so on. Some templates (for example, Publishing Portal and Business Intelligence centre) can only be used at the Site Collection level.

Each Site Collection has a single Root Site and as many Sub Sites as are required. As a user, you don't have permission to create Site Collections. This is done by your SharePoint administrators using a special website called Central Administration. Just bear in mind that sometimes when you are setting properties in SharePoint, the changes that you make will apply to the complete Site Collection, and not just to the Site that you are working in. The following diagram shows the relationship between Sites and Site Collections. The mix of Sites and Site Collections in your particular environment is arbitrary, and is determined by what your SharePoint architect has defined. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing from the address of a site whether it is a Sub Site or the Root Site of a Site Collection.

See also