SharePoint 2007 administration part V: Site Collection administration

This is the fifth post in a six-part series on SharePoint 2007 administrative commands. So far I’ve covered:

• Part I: Overview
• Part II: Farm administration
• Part III: web application administration
• Part IV: Shared Service Provider (SSP) administration

In this post I will review Site Collection-scoped administrative functions. Note: everyone with a My Site is a Site Collection Administrator of their personal site, so this section is also applicable for gaining an understanding of the delegated administrative rights that MySites unleash

Site Collection Administrators

Site Collection Administrators can add/remove other Site Collection Administrators, but cannot reduce the number of Site Collection Administrators below two. Farm Administrators can always specify new Primary and Secondary Site Collection Administrators within Central Administration, although additional Site Collection Administrators specified from within the Site Collection will retain their rights if the primary and secondary administrators are changed

Top-Level Site Galleries

Site Template Gallery

A repository of all non-default site templates available to the top-level site and all sites beneath it

List Template Gallery

A repository of all non-default list templates available to the top-level site and all sites beneath it

Web Part Gallery

A repository of all Web Parts available to the top-level site and all sites beneath it

Site Collection Workflows

Displays the currently active/inactive workflows, their associations and activity within the site collection

Site Collection Administration Settings

These are not only the administrative activities that Site Collection Owners need to be trusted to perform, these employees need to have adequate training to understand the impact of these actions

Search settings

Specify whether or not to use custom scopes and chose a Search Centre to display those results

Search scopes

Manage and define the custom scopes enabled above

Search keywords

Manage and define keywords/synonyms. The Keyword Phrase is what search queries will match to return a keyword result

Recycle bin

Manage deleted items. See the notes regarding storage quota templates in part II of this series for more information on the second-stage recycle bin

Site directory settings

MOSS-only. Specify a Site Directory location and Site Directory listing enforcement for new site creation

Site collection usage reports

View Site Collection Usage Reports. This is broadly the same as the site usage report, but adds top query and top destination report

Site collection features

Activate/Deactivate features for the Site Collection

Site hierarchy

A list of all webs that have been created within the Site Collection with links to the home pages and site administration pages of each

Portal site connection

The Portal Site Connection is a sort of reverse breadcrumb, located next to the link to the Site Collection home page in the upper left-hand corner of a page. If, for instance, a Site Collection is created at http://site1/nav1/test, a portal site connection could be created to http://site1/nav1. This allows for a simulacrum of hierarchy for navigation purposes while allowing Site Collection Ownership to retain the autonomous authority it requires

MOSS Site Collection Administration

Site collection audit settings

MOSS-only. Specify events to audit for sites, lists and items. Document libraries and items in them have additional auditing options

Audit log reports

MOSS-only. View audit reports and create/run custom reports

Site collection policies

MOSS-only. Create Site Collection information management policies from those enabled at the farm level (labels, auditing, expiration and barcodes by default). Policies can also be imported

Site collection output cache

MOSS-only. Page output caching can be useful when content is largely static, such as on internet-facing web sites. It requires sufficient RAM to maintain the cached elements. This page allows the selection of an Output Cache Profile for anonymous and authenticated users and defines the Output Cache Policy

Site collection cache profiles

MOSS-only. Create and Modify Output Cache Profiles, such as for public internet sites and extranets. This page includes some quite technical configuration

Site collection object cache

MOSS-only. Object caching is used internally by SharePoint to speed performance but in some cases the information in the cache may become stale and will need to be flushed. This page allows flushing and resetting of the object and disks caches, specifies a maximum size for the object cache in memory and defines the retention settings for Cross List Query results

Variations

MOSS-only. Variations allows for a number of variant sites to be created from a source site. This may be useful when operating in a multilingual or multicultural environment. With workflow settings the variant sites can be updated whenever source content is changed. This settings page specifies automated behaviour regarding creation and re-creation of target sites, web part publication settings, change notification and resource propagation

Variation labels

MOSS-only. Variation Labels are the names given to each variant. This administrative page allows creation and modification of labels and assignment of labels to positions within a variation label hierarchy

Variation logs

MOSS-only. Displays information about the success and failures of the variation operations

Translatable columns

MOSS-only. Specify which columns need to be translated for variations