SiteCollection in Sharepoint 2013

 SiteCollection  in Sharepoint 2013

A site collection is a logical container that holds a set of SharePoint sites hosted in a web application. Whenever you work in SharePoint and you want to publish a site, regardless of whether it’s an Internet, intranet, or extranet solution, you will have at least one web application with one site collection, made of one site.

To create a new site collection, you need a web application, which you can create by selecting the Manage Web Applications menu item from the SPCA home page, or by using the corresponding PowerShell command.

Every site collection must have at least one site collection administrator, but it can have more than one. Thus, when creating a new site collection, you need to designate a primary site collection administrator and, optionally, a secondary one. After having created a site collection, you will be able to add as many site collection administrators as you like. A site collection administrator has the rights to create, update, or delete any site contained in a site collection. The administrator also has full rights to administer content within those sites.


Following are the five main functional groups of SharePoint 2013 templates:


Collaboration These are sites whose structure has been designed to facilitate collaboration. The Collaboration group includes the following templates: Team Site, Blank Site,Document Workspace, Blog, Group Work Site, Developer Site, Project Site, Community Site, and Visio Process Repository.

Meetings This group contains templates for sites related to meetings and meeting organization. The available templates are Basic Meeting Workspace, Blank Meeting Workspace, Decision Meeting Workspace, Social Meeting Workspace, and Multipage Meeting Workspace.

Enterprise These templates target enterprise-level needs in the areas of document management, policies, and so on. They include Document Center, Discover Center, Records Center, Business Intelligence Center, Enterprise Search Center, My Site Host, Community Portal, and Basic Search Center.

Publishing This group corresponds to sites intended for web-publishing purposes. The available templates are Publishing Portal, Enterprise Wiki, and Product Catalog.


Custom This is where you can develop your own site templates. Also in this group is a list of all the available custom templates, if any exist.

Figure  shows the home page of a site collection created by using the Team Site template of SharePoint 2013.

sharepoint 2013 Basic Concepts

Sharepoint 2013 Basic Concepts

SharePoint Central Administration(SPCA)


SPCA is a website based on the SharePoint engine; it’s designed to administer and monitor a SharePoint server farm. When you deploy a new farm, by default the first server takes the role of SPCA host. Nevertheless, in a well-defined SharePoint server farm, you should deploy at least two servers hosting SPCA, for better availability and business continuity of the farm.

The following list describes the main areas of SPCA:

Application Management : Here, you can manage existing web applications, as well as create new web applications, site collections, and content databases.

Monitoring : From this area, you have access to a set of tools for monitoring the farm, checking for issues, and solving problems.

Security : Here, you can manage administrative accounts and services’ accounts of the farm, and configure all the security-related features.

General Application Settings : This is the area where you manage general settings, such as site directory and search engine settings, content deployment features, form services, and more.

System Settings : From this area, you can manage servers in the farm, the farm topology, services on servers, and farm customization features.

Backup and Restore : This area provides access to all the tools for managing and handling disaster recovery tasks.

Upgrade and Migration : Here, you can manage upgrade and patching tasks.

Apps : This area provides access to the app configuration and management tools. You can configure and monitor installed apps and apps licenses, as well as your corporate catalog of apps.


Configuration Wizards : This area provides a wizard to configure the farm from scratch.



Information courtesy: Microsoft SharePoint 2013:Developer Reference

Introduction to sharepoint 2013

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 

Microsoft SharePoint is one of the biggest productivity frameworks released by Microsoft during the last 10 years. 

SharePoint 2013 is just one more step of a fabulous journey (that began in 2001) in the world of business productivity, collaboration, knowledge sharing, search technologies, enterprise social networking, and web content management.

From a developer’s perspective, SharePoint is a rich set of tools, classes, libraries, and controls that are useful for building custom solutions and apps focused on making business collaboration and enterprise social networking possible.

Main Benefits


Microsoft grouped the features and services provided by SharePoint 2013 into five main categories of

benefits: Share, Organize, Discover, Build, and Manage.

Share

SharePoint 2013 enables you to share ideas and content with others. For example, you can use SharePoint for storing and sharing documents, contacts, and tasks; organizing meetings; managing business processes; and more. When you share something with SharePoint, you can also put it in the social network of your colleagues, customers, partners, and contacts in general, regardless of whether they are on your corporate network, on Facebook, on Twitter, or elsewhere. Through SharePoint, people can discover what you shared, as well as share contents with you. Using the new social features of SharePoint 2013, you can keep track of what your colleagues are working on.

With SharePoint 2013 and the new Microsoft Office 2013, you can publish documents and content from any Office application, sharing them with people inside or outside your organization. You cantake advantage of these capabilities from your desktop computer as well as from any Internet-capable mobile device, such as Microsoft Surface and other tablets running Microsoft Windows 8 or RT, as well as smartphones based on the Windows Phone operating system or devices based on iOS.

Organize

Through SharePoint 2013, you can organize your projects and tasks, and even integrate SharePoint with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Project to keep your projects on track. The product will help you manage tasks, as well as their status and due dates. You will be able to keep your team connected, through specific team sites, which enable you and others to track meetings, share documents, store emails, and do whatever else is useful for your team collaboration.

Discover

With SharePoint 2013, you can search for content via a professional search engine, which can be customized for your needs.

Build

One of the most exciting new features of SharePoint 2013 is its apps-extensibility model. You can develop custom apps for Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013, using the power of the cloud. You can design everything from business apps for the marketplace at large to a corporate catalog targeting your employees.

Manage

SharePoint 2013 gives you a mature, maintainable, and manageable environment, which can be hosted on-premises as well as in the cloud, using Microsoft Office 365. You can also keep some of your services and content on-premises while deploying others on Office 365, within a hybrid infrastructure.The new capabilities of Office 365 reduce the time to market for your solutions, allowing you to concentrate your resources and time on the project, the contents, and the custom features, rather than on the infrastructure under the cover.

Information courtesy :Microsoft SharePoint 2013:Developer Reference