SharePoint 2010 for Project Management, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Setting Up the PMIS

Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.

—Chinese proverb

The first step in taking advantage of SharePoint 2010 in a PMIS is to familiarize yourself with the structure of SharePoint 2010 sites. SharePoint 2010 sites are collaborative websites that are organized in a hierarchy. They are composed of top-level sites and subsites, as shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. SharePoint site hierarchy

A top-level site is created upon installation of SharePoint 2010 (SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010). It will never have a parent or higher-level site, and it may or may not have child sites or subsites. It is sometimes referred to as a root website. By default, additional top-level sites can only be created by the SharePoint 2010 administrator—essentially, the IT/IS folks responsible for SharePoint 2010—or anyone else given the permission to do so. (SharePoint 2010 permissions are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.) Subsites are sites that are created beneath an existing SharePoint site. They will always have a parent site and may or may not have their own subsites.

A site collection is an aggregation of a top-level site and its subsites. Site collections are independent of one another. A top-level site without subsites can also be considered a site collection. So, in short, a top-level site is synonymous ...