Friday, September 30, 2011

SharePoint Site Collection or Sub Site?

Option

Pros

Cons

Provision a Site Collection

  • More scalable than Sub Sites through management of quotas and content databases.
    • Quotas are managed at the site collection level
    • Maximum size can be the size of the content database
    • When sub sites grow too large, they need to be moved to or promoted to a site collection. This isn’t case if site is already a site collection.
  • Full fidelity backups are only possible at the Site Collection level
  • Site Collections allow security groups and permissions to be isolated from each other
  • You can prevent access to certain Feature functionality.
  • It’s easier to track and report on the site's lifecycle at the site collection level
  • Content type hub removes limitation from previous version of SharePoint of not being able to share content types and site columns across site collections.
  • Any sub sites created will inherit the site collection permissions, navigation, and branding
  • No permission inheritance since it is top level site.
  • Security Management is more complex with Site Collections
    • Difficult to see what access a user has across Site Collection
    • No OOTB way to synchronize across Site Collections
  • Inconsistent Navigation which would require creation of a SharePoint Feature Staple (code)
  • Inconsistent branding would require creation of a SharePoint Feature Staple (code)
  • Search Settings must be manually (or programmatically) synchronized across site collections
  • Site Collections can only be provisioned via the Central Administration (CA) Site where only farm administrators have access. If you don’t want team who provisions sites should to have access to CA, this would require one of the following:
    • Coded provisioning solution
    • Third Party Provisioning solution
    • Third party administration tool with security trimmed administrative interface
    • Multi-tenancy enablement which would provide a minimal view of CA

Provision a Sub Site

  • Inherits security from parent site
  • Inherits branding from parent site
  • Inherits navigation from parent site
  • Inherits search settings
  • Can aggregate data throughout your site hierarchy using Web Parts like the Content Query Web Part, Data View Web Part and other data aggregation Web Parts
  • Do not scale well which may require a move
    • Sub sites all exist in the same site collection container so if two sub-sites grow beyond a manageable size for a single site collection, that container cannot scale out its storage without breaking the collection apart into several site collections and facing other challenge
    • Moving sub sites is an administratively difficult task (may require a third party tool to manage
    • Moving sub sites with workflows attached breaks workflow history
    • Moving sub sites breaks URLs and links

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