Determine sites and subsites needed (Project Server)

  • Article

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

In this article:

  • Using sites and site collections

  • Decide whether to use single or multiple site collections or subsites within one site collection

  • Design site hierarchy

The information in this article is for site or application administrators who are creating sites. If you are hosting sites, but not designing or creating the sites, you can skip this step and continue on with the planning process.

Using sites and site collections

SharePoint sites work best when they are focused on a single effort or are used by a single team. They become difficult to maintain, out of date, and less useful when too many people are coming to the site for different things. For example, if the same site is used for tracking customers, storing company policies, and sharing documents about projects, then the site is much harder to organize and can quickly become cluttered. When working with Project workspace sites, it is best to maintain focus on the support of the project that it is associated with.

Decide whether to use single or multiple site collections or subsites within one site collection

Microsoft Office Project Web Access is installed as a top-level Web site and as such has its own site collection. There are times when you might want to have more than one site collection to house your project workspace sites. This decision is based on how much the sites have in common with each other, whether you want to be able to manage them individually, and whether you want them to share elements, such as navigation or search. You might also want to manage the size of your content database. You can do this by creating additional top-level Web sites that use their own content database for the site collection.

Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 allows you to create project workspace sites as children of any site. Microsoft Office Project 2007 allows you to create a project workspace site as a child of the master project workspace site.

Within a site collection, all sites can use the same:

  • Navigation bars (top navigation bar and breadcrumb bar)

  • Content types

  • Workflows

  • Security groups

  • Lookup fields across lists

  • Search scope

  • Feature set

Choose top-level Web sites in separate site collections when you:

  • Need separate security for different sites. Project Server security groups are automatically synchronized. However, you might want to create your own security groups.

    Note

    Although you can have unique permissions for a subsite, at times you may want to be sure that there are no users and permissions in common between two sites. In those cases, you should use separate site collections.

  • Might need to move the site collection to a different database in the future.

  • Want to be able to back up or restore just that site.

  • Want to be able to scope a workflow to just that site.

  • Want to have a separate search scope for just that site.

  • Want to use quotas to separately manage the amount of space each site takes up.

  • Want to decentralize your administration and have site collection administrators perform tasks like approving requests for access or confirming site use.

Choose subsites within the same site collection when you:

  • Want to share navigation between sites.

  • Want to have subsites inherit permissions from parent sites.

  • Want to share lists between sites.

  • Want to share design elements (such as themes or styles) between sites.

Design site hierarchy

You can use the Site Hierarchy Planning tool (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73142) (a downloadable Microsoft Office Visio 2007 file) or other method to create a site hierarchy diagram, including all site collections, top-level Web sites, and subsites that you need. We recommend that you use the hierarchy /projectserver if possible. When that won't suffice — for example, it gets too big — separate the project workspace sites across site collections that are relevant groupings of projects.

Download this book

This topic is included in the following downloadable book for easier reading and printing:

See the full list of available books at Downloadable content for Project Server 2007.