Managing Site Settings in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010

• Sites vs. Site Collections

• Site Settings (Subsite)

• Site Settings (Top-Level Site)

• Summary

So you’ve spent some time becoming familiar with Microsoft SharePoint, and before you know it, your team considers you the go-to SharePoint person. You’ve learned how to add items to a library, build new documents and list items, change existing items, and even administer the document and item libraries on your Team Site. What’s next?

Perhaps it’s time to take your SharePoint skills to the next level. You’ve been asked by your management team to build a team collaboration site. You send in a Help Desk ticket to build the site, and IT responds by making you the site owner—perhaps even the Site Collection administrator.

But wait… is this going to be a problem? Not for you—you’re going to learn about being both site owner and Site Collection administrator in this section. Specifically, you are going to learn about site settings within a SharePoint Foundation 2010 site/Site Collection.

Sites vs. Site Collections

Chapter 3, “End-User Features and Experience,“ presents a fairly detailed discussion of sites versus Site Collections. If you came directly to this chapter, don’t worry, we’ll briefly discuss this again before diving into the site settings menus.

Simply put, a Site Collection is a grouping of sites. These sites are grouped hierarchically, with the first site in the Site Collection being called a top-level site. The top-level site is identical to all other sites, with the exception of additional menu items to control Site Collection–specific settings. Sites other than the top-level site are referred to as Subsites.