SharePoint 2010: Farm, web application, sites collection, sites and subsites, how to know what to use?

Didier Danse — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 18:02:42 GMT

Original post: SharePoint: Farm, web application, sites collection, sites and subsites, how to know what to use?

Because of the scalability of SharePoint, each one who has to organize a SharePoint infrastructure is quickly set against an important question: What to use and at what time? There isn’t only one answer to this. Each element that composes an complete Infrastrcutre has typical properties and objectives. So we have to use the best container according to objectives and content.

There is some kind of containers. The most important are:

1a) SharePoint Farm (SPFarm from a SharePoint point of view)
1b) Services applications
2) Web Application (SPWebApplication)
3) Sites Collection (SPSite)
4) Sites (SPWeb)
4) Sub sites (SPWeb)

Mainly the first four elements (in blue) are used for technical reasons while the two other ones are used to structure sites and data from a logical point of view.

So have a quick look through elements that are used in a SharePoint infrastructure. For more details, please use the best tool in the developers’ world: Internet.

1.A) SharePoint Farm

A SharePoint farm is a group of front-end servers, applicative servers (Shared Services), indexing servers and database servers. A SharePoint farm can be deployed to a particular location according to objectives (Internet access, geographical localization, …).

1.B) Service applications

This is a set of services that are available at farm level. Because of this, it is shared between the different web applications and site collections.

These services are responsible of:

User Profile (profile properties, synch parameters)
Search (scopes, properties mappings, content sources, …)
Excel Services
Business Data Catalog
…

Each service can be enabled or disabled on each SharePoint servers. This allows SharePoint infrastructure to be the most efficient and met security and availability requirements.

2) Web Application

There is nothing new for ITs or developers that already worked with sites or applications powered by ASP.NET, PHP or all server-side technologies. A web application characteristics are:

A site in IIS
A particular url
A authentication method associated with this web application

We can notice that a web application uses its own database in a SharePoint context (to be more precise, it is the case for new application. There is the possibility to create Web Applications extensions. These extensions can use different parameters that the main web application. We will use this when we want to share data between web applications and use different authentication modes for example).

Furthermore, SharePoint is an ASP.NET application so it uses Web.config files. We will be able to add differents entries according to the objectives of the web application. We will remove some features if the web application is used by partners for example.

Finally, a web application is always associated with a SSP.

3) Sites Collection

A sites collection is a virtual container (there is no physical file as it is the case for previously described elements) and sites collection structure is stored in a configuration database.

Form an IT point of view, sites collection has some advantages. The main advantages are:

Content quota templates
Ease of maintenance (backup / restore is performed by site collection by default)

From a content manager point of view, we will notice that an administrator is defined each site collection. This administrator can manage:

Second level Recycle bin
Customized search
Users of the site collection
…

Lastly, site collections is used to bring customized elements together and shared them with a audience that will access data across this sites collection (per example a department):

Master Pages
Images
Sites and lists Templates
Web parts

There is always a root site in a site collection.

4) Sites and subsites

In the beginning of this post, we told a lot of time of IT guys, a little bit about developers but I didn’t told about about end users even though they are the driving force of SharePoint content.

At this level, everything is related to content management. According to the users permissions, they can:

Create sites
Create lists
Attach workflow to lists
Grant permissions
Restore deleted content
A lot of others operations!

At this level, there is only one important thing to manage and organize data: company best practices and rules. It doesn’t matter where data are logically based, it will be physically stored in the same database. However, data should be spread all around sites and sub-sites. Do not hesitate to use important feature as permissions inheritance. It will help to organize data efficiently.

It is possible to add some code or reporting tools but the most important thing is the end-user and power-user training.

Here is a SharePoint structure example:

Farm
- Web Application 1
  - Sites collection A (with top-level site)
    - Site A.1
      - Site A.1.1
      - Site A.1.2
    - Site A.2
  - Sites collection B (with top-level site)
    - Site B.1
      - Site B.1.1
        
        Site B.1.1.1
    - Site B.2
- Web Application 2
  - Sites collection C (with top-level site)
    - […]
  - Sites collection D (with top-level site)
    - […]

There is a lot things to write about this topic. I hope that you will have an understandable overview of SharePoint infrastructure and also the reasons of getting information from Internet or specialist.

____

Didier Danse – http://didierdanse.net

Microsoft Most Valuable Professional SharePoint
Devoteam Luxembourg – Devoteam Group

SharePoint: How to activate anonymous access

Didier Danse — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:54:19 GMT

The following screenshots are based on SharePoint 2010 but the way to do the operation is the same with SharePoint 2007.

SharePoint can be used for Public Internet facing web sites. Internet web sites are mostly available for anonymous users. By default, SharePoint ask for credentials, which is not the expected behavior for these Internet sites.

SharePoint can be easily opened to anonymous users. Just follow these steps:

Enable anonymous access for the web application

As authentication settings are active at web application level, you have to go to the Central Administration > Application Management

Select the Web Application you want to use and click on Authentication Providers

The default authentication provider is Windows. Click on default and you will be able to manage some settings for this provider.

One of them is Anonymous access. Check the corresponding check box and now you can set some permissions for anonymous users.

Global permissions for anonymous users

Back to the Web applications list. Click on Anonymous Policy.

You can now set global permissions for anonymous users.

Allow anonymous users to access your site

Go to your public web site.

Depending on your architecture, login prompt is display or not. When you are authenticated with an account that has access to site settings, click on Site Permissions.

Because you have activated the anonymous access at Web application level, you have a button in the ribbon named Anonymous access.

Select the permissions for the anonymous access

That’s all! Now anonymous users can access your SharePoint site! That’s the first step in implementing Web Content Management using SharePoint.

____

Didier Danse
Devoteam Luxembourg – Devoteam Group

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SharePoint 2010: Farm, web application, sites collection, sites and subsites, how to know what to use?

SharePoint: How to activate anonymous access