Performing Administrative Tasks Using Central Administration (part 10) - Site Collections

12/26/2010 4:46:07 PM

1.16. Site Collections

The Site Collections section of the Application Management functional category gives the farm administrator the ability to manage all aspects of a site collection. You can remotely add new site collections to existing Web applications that have been provisioned with a site template, or you can configure a quota limit that applies to the content of all Web application site collections. This remote management facility provides administrators with an easy and centralized way to configure sites and site collections that exist on all available Web applications on the farm.

It is important to make sure you are making changes to the right Web application, however. For example, if you don’t choose the correct Web application when you make changes, you could inadvertently specify a low quota limit to a Web application that hosts a site collection with content that already exceeds that quota limit, which could potentially prevent users from adding any new content to the document libraries and lists stored in that site collection. There are eight site collection management options that can be configured in Site Collections section of Application Management.

Create Site Collections
Delete A Site Collection
Confirm Site Use And Deletion
Specify Quota Templates
Configure Quotas And Locks
Change Site Collection Administrators
View All Site Collections
Configure Self-Service Site Creation

1.16.1. Create site collections

You can create new top-level site collections when you create your Web application or any time later using the Create Site Collections option in Application Management. You can create a top-level site collection using either the root URL of an unextended Web application or a managed path such as /sites or any other wildcard inclusion path you have created. See the discussion in the section titled Section 1.7.8 earlier in this article that discusses configuring a managed path. When creating a new site collection, you will provide the following information.

Title and description
Website address using either the root of the Web application or a URL path
A site template that will be used to create the new site collection
A site collection administrator and a secondary administrator if required
A quota limit template if required

Note:

If you wanted to create a site hierarchy based on a managed path URL mapping called projects, you first need to create the new managed path called projects for the Web application. Then you can create each site collection using the projects URL path and add each new project as its own sub URL of the projects URL, such as http://contosoportal/projects/ProjectA.

Be sure to choose the correct Web application before creating the site collection so the collection is available in the correct Web application. Figure 10 shows the site collection called Project A being created in the wildcard inclusion managed path called projects.

Figure 10. Creating a site collection using a wildcard inclusion managed path

1.16.2. Delete a site collection

In the same way that you can create a top-level site collection, you also can delete a site collection from within the Site Collection category in Application Management. You begin doing so by selecting the site collection you want to delete from the drop-down menu on the Delete Site Collection page. After selecting Change Site Collection from the drop-down menu, you will see a list of site collections displayed for the Web application that you have most recently accessed. To display a list of site collections for a different Web application, use the Web Application drop-down menu located at the upper-right of the page to open the Select Site Collection page shown in Figure 11.

Note:

Best Practices When you delete a site collection, all the content is deleted within it, including subsites, lists, and libraries. Therefore, you should perform a backup of the content database containing the site collection or export the site collection first, in case you need to recover the content at a later time.

Figure 11. Selecting a site collection to delete

After clicking OK on the Select Site Collection page, you will see the Delete Site Collection page displayed again with the entire path of the site collection shown along with a Delete button. Click Delete and then click OK on the confirmation dialog box to delete the selected site collection.