SharePoint/Overview of Sharepoint's components

Overview of overview

The term "component" is not accurate and is not recommended. This article uses it for ease of understanding.

Web Applications

A web application can be understood as a "framework" that acts as a logical unit for the site collections that you create. You must first create a Web Application before creating a site/site collection.

You can create multiple site collections in a single web application, the number of site collections you can have depends on the capacity of your server infrastructure.

Site Collections

A site collection is made up of one top-level site and all sites below it. Every site belongs to only one site collection.

Creating a site collection is equivalent to creating the first and top-level site for this collection.

To create subsites, enable self-service site creation or grant Create Subsites permission for users.

Sites

Sites can provide many functions, including collaborative work, document publishing, content search, etc.

You can create multiple sites to provide different functions. Site functionality can be provided by selecting a template.

Site Templates

SharePoint Server provides many site templates which provide different functionality.

Commonly used templates

Name	Description	Comment
Team Site	Publish documents and updates, and work together with a group of people.	Preferred.
Blog	Create posts to share your experience, ideas, and opinions.
Project Site	Similar to a team site, but you can plan and track project progress.
Community Site	Similar to Reddit, you can use it as an internal social media.
Document Center	A site to centrally manage documents.
Enterprise Search Center	A site focused on delivering an enterprise-wide search experience.	Should be separate site collections.
My Site Host	Leave your profile so people can contact you.
Publishing Portal	Typically used as a portal and links to other sites.
Enterprise Wiki	A site focused on sharing knowledge.

Service Applications

Service applications are the infrastructure of SharePoint. Web applications and site collections rely on one or more service applications to work properly.

After installation, service applications are automatically set up if you run the configuration wizard.

Service applications can be shared across web applications even across farms. You can also create multiple identical service applications and manually specify which one is used for each web application. As a reminder, The scale of your farms is up to you.

A brief introduction to each service application

Name	Description
App Management Service Application	All apps (Not Web Applications) rely on the App Management service application.
Business Data Connectivity Service Application	Acts as the communication bridge between SharePoint Server and the external service that hosts the external data.
Machine Translation Service	If a site collection is configured with language variants, you can use this service for machine translation.
Managed Metadata Service	Collects and manages the metadata. Providing specialized uses for other services or features.
PowerPoint Conversion Service Application	Enables the conversion of PowerPoint presentations to various formats.
Project Server Service Application	Enables Project Server for SharePoint Server so that users can create and edit .mpp files on SharePoint.
Search Service Application	Crawls and processes items, performs analysis and generates indexes. Users can use the Enterprise Search Center to find items.
Secure Store Service Application	Used to store credentials and authenticate to service applications and external services.
State Service	Provides temporary storage of user session data for SharePoint Server components.
Usage and Health data collection	Collects farm-wide usage and health data and provides the ability to view various usage and health reports.
User Profile Service Application	Creates and manages user properties and profiles, and sets the My Site host.
Visio Graphics Service	Allows users to share and view Visio web drawings. Requires Enterprise Edition to use.
Word Automation Services	Automate processing of .docx or other text files based on usage intent.
Workflow Service Application	Provides services for various workflow technologies for SharePoint Server.

A site planning example

All the subsites in the site collection share a root or parent URL (In the same Web Application).

Use a different URL path for each site collection.

The first site in each site collection serves as an overview or navigation to the subsites.

Create a subsite for your teams and set permissions.