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(Editor's note: This is the first in a series of SharePoint articles by Amanda Murphy, a product manager for Infotech Canada, a company that focuses entirely on Microsoft products such as SharePoint, Office, and Project Server. This tutorial first appeared on Amanda's blog. Amanda joins Intranet Journal's other SharePoint writer, Robert Bogue.)

There seems to be some confusion on the difference between site collections and sites in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Almost everyone I speak to that has experience with SharePoint Server 2003 stumbles with this when they first start working with SharePoint 2007. So for that reason … I shall write a quick tutorial about it.

In SharePoint Portal Server 2003, whenever you went to the sites directory and clicked the Create Site link under the Actions menu, you were creating a site collection. Every site collection has a top level site where things such as site templates, list templates, and cross site groups existed.

Within a site collection, additional sites could be created that would share certain things (such as the template galleries and potentially permissions) with the top level site. In essence, the site collection was its own unique hierarchy of SharePoint sites and for the most part completely independent of other site collections. In a stand alone installation of WSS there was typically only one site collection. In SharePoint Server, there could be hundreds, which is why organizing them effectively in the Sites Directory and Areas (via listings) was very important and crucial. In fact, the primary role of SharePoint Portal Server -- aside from the additional functionality it provided in enterprise features such as search, audiences, and personal sites -- was the ability to organize the massive amounts of data that exists across multiple site collections better.

By default in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (if you are using the Corporate Intranet Portal template as your default site) when you go to the "Sites" link and click the Create site button … you are instead creating a site that is a member of the site collection your portal is in.

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