Overview of SharePoint Components

Summary: This first step to getting SharePoint right is understanding the basic SharePoint components. This post outlines the following SharePoint components: SharePoint site collection, sub sites, libraries, lists and webpages

SharePoint Site Collection
The SharePoint Site Collection contains all your site components. It includes a top level site and any other sub sites you may create within it. A small organization, may have one site collection with a sub site for each department while a larger organizations may need a site collections per department.

Considerations when creating site collections:

1. Permissions/Audience: If there is a need for sharing external content, consider setting it up in a site collection for the internal content and a separate site collection for the external content.
2. Capacity of site collection vs content volume and number of users: Determine the amount of content expected (is there content to be migrated? project number of files generated per year?) and then check that against Microsoft SharePoint limitations for the company’s SharePoint version and plan. Here is the link to the SharePoint Online limitations
3. Site Collections will have some inherit features that will filter through the entire site collection. For example: site branding, Site features, permissions, site columns, content types etc. To avoid the effort of replicating the same settings for each site collection, review before hand if a new site collection is really needed.

Sub Sites
Sub sites are sites created with in a site collection. The sub sites can but does not have to inherit all the properties from the site collection level / top level site. Sites are usually create to separate content for different audiences within an organization. For example, each department will have its own sub site.

Lists
A list is essentially an excel table that contains rows and columns. Each row contains a single list item while the  columns store the metadata. In SharePoint, there are many different types of lists: Contact list, Tasks list, Calendar, Announcements, Survey etc. Each list type has unique settings and characteristics yet they are all made of columns to store metadata and rows containing unique list items.

The benefit of using a SharePoint list versus an excel table is that each list item becomes its own record. Workflows and versioning are available for each list item. Multiple users can edit the list at once and edit their own record.

Libraries
A library is a special list that specifically stores documents. The library contains rows for each document and columns to contain metadata pertaining to each document. When storing documents always use a library since this contains all the document management features required to properly manage your documents. There are several types of libraries available to store different kinds of documents. Examples: Document library, Picture Library, Wiki Library, Form library etc

Considerations for Libraries/Lists

1. Documents should always be stored in a library not a list. –
2. Permissions: As a best practice permissions should be set at library level. Item level permissions can be set but is not recommended. If your library requires unique read or edit permissions, create a new library.
3. Size: SharePoint can store millions of documents in a single library or list but there is a 5,000 item limit in the view threshold. Meaning, you cannot view more than 5000 documents in one view/page. There are ways around it but if you can it is easier to avoid creating libraries that will store over 5000 documents.

Webpages
Webpages display your content on a page for the end user to easily access and navigate through the content. This can include text, images, libraries and lists. When lists and libraries are added to a webpage, they are added as web parts. The site homepage is a webpage; the site template chosen when the site is created will determine the type of homepage generated. Any additional webpages are stored in a library within that site. There are different kinds of webpages available.  Types of webpages include: Wiki pages, web part pages, and publishing pages.

Below is an example of a SharePoint site collection. The top level site contains information for the entire company while sub sites contain information specific for each department.

The next step is understanding metadata, columns and content types.