About Microsoft SharePoint 2013 : What Is a Site?

1. What Is the Difference Between SPF, SharePoint Server, and SharePoint 365?

SharePoint Server is an extension of SPF. SharePoint Server sites have features that are not available in SPF sites, and they enjoy all the features of SPF sites.

SPF sites work well for collaboration sites. Such a site gives groups of people the ability to upload and download documents, use discussion boards, assign tasks, share events, and use workflows. However, SPF does not have enough features to be a good platform for a corporate portal or for a corporate search solution. SharePoint Server offers extra features that upgrade SPF into a platform that can serve a corporation with enterprise searching (searching from one location across all the sites that that corporate has, and on documents and external systems that are stored in other locations, not just in SharePoint). It also has features for storing details about people and searching on them, and it enables employees to have their own personal sites where they can store documents (instead of on their machines). SharePoint Server has many more features related to business intelligence and business processes and forms.

Finally, SharePoint Server has a publishing feature that enables site managers to create publishing sites where they can easily author pages (as opposed to documents) and publish them using workflows. This is very important for large corporations that want to, for example, publish corporate news using an approval workflow or build an Internet site where every page must go through a special approval process.

SharePoint 365 is also based on SPF, but it offers optional features in addition, depending on the Office 365 plan you purchased. In some ways, these additional features, when added, increase the functionality of the SharePoint 365 site to be similar to the functionality of a SharePoint server site.

However, you can look for one thing in most SharePoint sites to determine with a fair degree of certainty whether a site is SharePoint Server or SPF: You can look for the Newsfeed link under the Name dropdown at the top of the screen (see Figure 1). If you see that link, you are viewing a site that is running on a server with SharePoint Server, or an Office 365 site that has that feature. Not having the link does not necessarily mean that the site does not have SharePoint Server, however, because the administrator can choose to disable that functionality.

FIGURE 1 The Newsfeed link under the Name dropdown signifies that you are on a SharePoint Server or SharePoint in Office 365 site.

A similar approach can help determine what features are available on your SharePoint 365 site. The most probable cause is that the feature is a part of a more advanced Office 365 plan, and you must upgrade your plan in order to use that feature. However, sometimes features that you should be able to use are not available for other reasons, so contacting your local Office 365 support or a Microsoft Office 365 Expert partner is always a good idea. One way to tell whether you are on an Office 365 site, though, is that it should say Office 365 on the top-left corner of the page (instead of SharePoint; refer to Figure 1). However, this is another area where the site’s designer might have removed that text altogether, so not seeing it does not mean that you are not in an Office 365 environment.

2. What Is a Site?

The structure of SharePoint sites (sometimes referred to as webs) is very different from the structure of typical Internet sites that contain only pages. In SharePoint, a site can house more than just pages. It is a container that holds lists and libraries, and it can have other sites under it.

For example, a corporate portal might have a home site called SharePoint Intranet that contains information that people see when they browse to that site. That portal might also have a subsite called Human Resources that stores forms such as travel requests, expense claims, and other forms. The two sites are linked because the Human Resources site is under the SharePoint Intranet site. The two sites might share some attributes such as security (who is allowed to do what in the sites) and navigation (so that visitors to the sites can navigate between the sites), but they have separate content—for example, different pages, libraries, and lists. Figures 2 and 3 show examples of a site with subsites, and a site that is a subsite.

FIGURE 2 A site that has subsites. Human Resources and Projects are subsites of the SharePoint Intranet site.

FIGURE 3 A site that is a subsite. The Human Resources site is under the SharePoint Intranet site.

Every SharePoint site is a member of a site collection. A site collection is, as the name implies, a collection of sites. Every site collection has a single site as its root site, and other sites can be built under the root site. A site collection has some attributes that are common to all the sites in that collection (for example, some search settings and a Recycle Bin for deleted items).