Difference Between Site Collection , Sites and SubSites

One of the most frequently asked question about sharepoint is “What is site Collection ? What is Site and What is Sub Site ?“ , so here I have tried to explain it .


Site Collection, Sites And Sub Sites All are same , How ? Think of a Big Box,If you put Small Box in an big Box then first you have to open Big Box and then you have to put a small box in it , similarly if you have another smaller box you can put it in the smaller one now your big Box have a Small Box And Small box have an Smaller Box , you can have as many boxes as you want , but why I am explaining it here Think of Site Collection as a Big Box and Site as Small Box and Sub Site as More Smaller Box , So far all are boxes and have same properties but all Are Dependent in a way that if you are not opening Big Box you cannot get Small Box , Now SharePoint Also works likes this , But why SharePoint have done this ? because to manage things in hierarchies are simple for example "Permissions", If I Lock the big Box no one is going to see Other boxes but if I lock the Second Box no one will be able to See the third one inside it , Logically All of these are same but Site Collection have more Advance features because it is the First Box .

The SharePoint Way :

In SharePoint

1st level is : Site Collection

2nd Level is: Sites

3rd Level is: Sub Sites .

Example : Think of a Bank which have many departments some are related and other are not realted to each other , IT is not related to any other department in sense of Transactions It makes softwares and give support , HR and IT are not linked with Each other as they have different roles . So if I say Create a SharePoint Site One must Create one Site Collection and Called it Bank [ Home] and create two Sub Sites and call them HR and IT .Great I have also done it first .

Now one day HR site is full of documents and IT site is fine they don’t have many documents on their site, Due to HR site IT Guys are also waiting for a long time, Now you have decided to separate them HR on one server and IT on Other server ( If you are not getting me here don’t worry it is only be understood by the one who deploy SharePoint on Farm ),Now you cannot separate them because SharePoint only gives you backup and restore facility at First Level that is Site Collection , It means you cannot separate IT and HR now ,You must have to do some homework for these things in start and identify which are dependent and which are not ? organizations will pay you for this ;)

It means we have done something wrong and now nothing can be done , So think in a broader way when you are creating site collections and sites, If we have created two site collections HR and IT we can shift them from one server to other it is only one benefit or Plus point goes to Site Collection,there are others ... But if you have got a task to create a Team Site for a group of HR people then you will definitely create it Under “HR” site collection you will not create it as another Site Collection ..

I Hope this will help ...
ask @ rahimkhowaja@hotmail.com