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Plan for collaboration sites (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

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Applies to: SharePoint Foundation 2010

With Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010, you can support collaboration sites in your environment. Collaboration sites store information that individuals and groups can collectively author, share, and revise. These sites do not need to be associated with a particular portal site collection or part of a publishing site collection. They can be stand-alone sites that are available for teams or groups of users who need to collaborate on projects or share information. For example, a team at an engineering firm might want a collaboration site to discuss current project status, assign tasks, or arrange group lunches, without publishing this internal information to the corporate intranet.

Collaboration sites can be made available for searching from your portal or publishing site so that information from these sites is not lost to your organization. However, for easier data recovery and maintenance, collaboration sites should be hosted either on a separate Web application or in separate content databases in the same Web application as your portal or publishing site.

You can create these collaboration sites for your users, or you can allow the users to create these sites on their own.

For more information about collaboration sites and architectural planning, see Design sample: collaboration sites (SharePoint Foundation 2010).

In this article:

  • Determine number of collaboration sites

  • Specific paths

  • Additional paths

Determine number of collaboration sites

Estimate approximately how many collaboration sites to expect in your environment, and how many such sites that you are willing to support. If you require users to request a collaboration site, you can control how many are created. If you let users create their own collaboration sites, you will have many of these sites in your environment.

Specific paths

You can use specific paths in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 to contain the SharePoint site collections, similar to the way that folders contain files or documents in the file system. By default, when you create a Web application, two paths are made available for you:

  • Root path (/)   This is an explicit inclusion that can contain one site collection. For example, if you want a URL to appear as http://company_name/default.aspx, you would create the site collection at this root path.

  • Sites path (/sites)   This is a general path that can contain many site collections. For example, when you use the /sites path, the URL for a site named Site_A would be similar to https://server_name/sites/Site_A/default.aspx.

    Note

    The name of the /sites path varies depending on the specific language that was used during installation.

Additional paths

You can also create additional paths. This enables you to group site collections. Then, when you create a site collection, you can choose from the following alternatives:

  • Create the site collection at the root of the Web application (if no site collection has already been created there).

  • Create the site collection under the /sites path.

  • Create the site collection under any additional paths that have been made available for that Web application.

In general, the /sites path should be sufficient for most installations. However, consider using other paths for the following situations:

  • You have a complex installation and expect to have many site collections, and you want to group similar sites together.

    For example, you could use /personal for individual user sites and /team for group collaboration sites, instead of using /sites for all.

  • You want to be able to add a filter to your firewall or router to constrain a specific namespace to internal access only.

    For example, you could expose the /team path for external collaboration, but not /personal.

Integration with Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010

Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 provides a rich client for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010, which enables real-time synchronization of desktop content with SharePoint documents and lists. Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 also provides options for creating ad hoc Groove collaboration workspaces and shared folder workspaces. Information can be easily synchronized both online and offline with a designated SharePoint site or with external partners and offsite team members via shared workspaces. Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 is installed automatically with enterprise versions of Microsoft Office 2010 or it can be installed separately from the Microsoft Download Center (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=48516).

For more information, see Plan for SharePoint Workspace 2010.