Working With Site Collections

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Working with Site Collections
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V 1.0
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Module Overview
Classic and modern site management
Hub Sites
Converting classic sites to modern
Creating Site Collections
Creating a Site Collection
Define Ownership and Security
SharePoint administrator options
Configuring Storage
Configure External Access
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Limit Sharing using domain names
Prevent external users from Sharing files and folders and sites
External users must use the same account invitations are sent to
Recovering Site Collections
Managing Site Collections with PowerShell
Module Overview
In this module you will focus on the design, setup, configuration and management of SharePoint Online Site
Collections. There are several differences and similarities to SharePoint on-premises site collection management
but like everything in Office 365 you don’t have access to the servers or Web Applications as you did on premises
so there will always be a level of restricted control compared to on premises.
You will also be looking at both classic and modern administration pages for site collections and comparing the
features of the two.
Therefore, in this module you will focus on the following topics:
• Classic and modern site management
• Understanding the topology of site collections
• Creating Site Collections
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• Defining ownership and security for Site Collections
• Configuring Storage
• Configure External Access to Site Collections
• Recovering Site Collections
• Managing Site Collections with PowerShell
Classic and modern site management
When you first create a new tenant Office 365 creates a default set of site collections in SharePoint Online. These
site collections are a mixture of Classic Site collections and modern communication template. You can see classic
site collection via the classic admin page which is accessed via The SharePoint admin center homepage -> More
features -> Classic site collections page.
The templates that are used for these site collections are derived from the on premises version of SharePoint from
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2013 so for companies upgrading from on premises versions of SharePoint 2013 or 2016 the look and feel is very
similar.
Over the years however Microsoft started developing new templates for SharePoint Online known as Modern site
templates. These templates leveraged the new SharePoint framework and allowed the new site collection
templates to communicate with other Office 365 services via the Office graph as well as connecting to external
sources to enable the building of new rich and responsive designed sites.
SharePoint Framework overview - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/sharepoint-

framework-overview
Be default several services in Office 365 now leverage the modern sites by default namely Office 365 groups and
teams. When you create either of these two objects a corresponding SharePoint site collection is created to allow
users to store files in their respective group or team. These site collections are created using the modern team site
template and they look very different to the classic SharePoint look and feel.
The primary difference therefore between the classic and the modern sites management page is that the classic
admin page only creates, displays and manages classic SharePoint templates whereas the modern admin center
allows the management, creation and display of both. By default new SharePoint site collections are created as
modern.
As you can in the below screen shot the modern admin center is showing both a classic site collection and a
modern one created as part of an Office 365 group.
You can switch between the classic and modern view at any time and at this time of writing there are still many
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management and configuration options that you can still only do in classic pages such as creating classic templates
and managing other services such as secure store and business connectivity.
There are also management options that you can only do in modern such as creating hub sites and aligning
SharePoint sites to a hub site and there is also a link to the new OneDrive Admin center page. More on hub sites
shortly.
Therefore at this time of writing unless your company is 100% working in modern templates you will find that you
need to switch between the two types of pages.
Hub Sites
Hub sites are a feature that allows a site collection to become the root of a 2 tier hierarchy of multiple site
collections that would otherwise be isolated in terms of navigation and association. If you create 12 site collections
by default they will not be connected by any form of a breadcrumb trial or navigation structure so by making a site
collection a hub site and the remaining 11 associated hub sites all site collection now get a navigation breadcrumb
trial to traverse to any of the sites from a single navigation link.
At the time of writing you can create up to 100 hub sites in an organization and you can only associate a site
collection with one hub site so you need to consider your taxonomy planning when associating to a hub site.
When you associate a site collection to a hub site it only adds the navigation capabilities it does not change any of
the properties of the site collection such as permissions. So if you want users to be able to traverse all the
associated site collections from the navigation then you will need to update the access permissions for the
associated site collections.
Hub sites can be modern or classic templates however only modern templates will show the navigation therefore
this is really designed as a modern feature to get the full capabilities.
To create a hub site you need to be in the modern admin page and on the Active Sites management page.
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Once you are on the active sites page select the site collection that you want to be a hub site. Once selected you
will get an option in the ribbon for ‘Hub Site’ and from here you need to select ‘Register as a hub Site’
Give the Hub Site a name based on the alignment with the other sites that will be associated.
You also need to specify who is given permissions to associate site collections with the hub site.
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Once the hub site is created you can then continue to start associating other site collections with the hub site by
selecting ‘Associate with a hub site’ in the Hub Site drop down menu.
Select the Hub Site to associate with and then save the changes.
When visiting a site collection that is associated with a hub site you will now notice a navigation link in the top
chrome bar of the site taking you to the hub site.
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Converting classic sites to modern
As part of your site collection strategy you may want to convert existing classic site collections to modern
capabilities. It is not possible to simply convert a site collection fully to modern but it is possible to change the
pages used in a site collection from classic wiki style to modern framework. In order to do this you will need
transform the classic pages to modern framework style.
This can be achieved in one of 3 ways:
• Using the SharePoint page transformation UI (preview)
o https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/transform/modernize-userinterface-site-pages-ui
• Use PowerShell using the ConvertTo-PNPClientSidePage which requires you to have the PNP extensions
loaded.
o https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/transform/modernize-userinterface-site-pages-
• Use Visual Studio and the .Net Framework engine
o https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/transform/modernize-userinterface-site-pages-
dotnet
You can also attach a site which is modern to a 365 group if it is not yet associated such as converting a classic site
to modern or a modern site that was not created via a Group. You cannot at this time connect a classic publishing
template such as a publishing portal or search center. By attaching a site you will get a modern home page and a
new office 365 group created in Exchange Online with an email address.
To find out more about this conversation process see this article https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint
/dev/transform/modernize-connect-to-office365-group
Creating Site Collections
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Before we dig deeper into the actual creation process for a Site Collection you should first consider some planning
and governance elements around these objects. A site collection is a logically boundary in SharePoint, it has
security groups that by default will cascade down to child sites but this can be changed and the site collection
administration has a more configuration options than a site administrator has so there is also a hierarchy
consideration for administration such as site collection features which could enable a ripple down consequence on
lower site administrators.
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There are also software boundaries that that SharePoint Online adheres to which is based on the level of
subscription you have. Here are a few examples but for the complete list refer to this article:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/SharePoint-Online-software-boundaries-and-limits-8F34FF47-
B749-408B-ABC0-B605E1F6D498
• 1 TB + 10GB per user
• 5,000 item list view & 12 lookup columns per view
• 25TB storage per site collection
• 500,000 site collections
• 2,000 subsites per site collection
• Recycle Bin size takes storage from available storage.
The recycle bin is something that on-premises administrators did not consider too much but in SharePoint online
the size does now matter. If you have 100GB in the recycle bin and your limit is 1TB of storage total for your tenant,
then you now only have 900GB available for your actual working data. Therefore, if you have a large user base with
aggressive recycle bin use you may need to consider data retention and storage requirement needs. You can
purchase additional storage when required.
Unlike SharePoint on-premises you cannot control database alignment either. In SharePoint online the database
logic is managed by Microsoft so there are some considerations in terms of performance and DR that have
changed if you have migrated or working in a hybrid model. More on backup and restore later in the module.
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A key design decision will be around the logical structure of your site collections, you can approach this from 3
choices:
• Single collaboration site collection – many subsites
o You will still have separate site collections for special types of site collections such as eDiscovery
• Multiple site collections no subsites
• Multiple site collections each with their own subsites
There is no correct answer but more a design discussion that you must have with the business and the users to
ensure functionality and business requirements are met. As part of the design discussion you must however
consider some of the other tools in Office 365 that can benefit users such as Delve or PowerBi enabling you to
design a collaboration design around SharePoint / Teams / Onedrive and then have data driven content surfaced
through various aggregation tools outside of SharePoint.
It is also worth noting that if users create a new Team or an Office 365 they will always create a Site Collection
therefore you should expect a very linear flat structure of site collections if you become heavy users of Teams
and/or groups.
Creating a Site Collection
As you have now discovered there are two ways to create site collections, either classic or modern depending on
your business needs. Let’s look at each process.
To create a site collection in modern click on the active site menu option and then click on the create site option.
Unlike the classic templates choice menu there are not as many options in the modern menu. By default you can
choose from two templates.
• Team Site
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o Used for standard collaboration
• Communication Site
o Used to create business and departmental intranet and comms sites.
It is possible to create some site collections based on the classic theme without being linked to an Office 365 group
which are based on the following templates:
• Document Center
• Enterprise Publishing Portal
• Project Web App site.
To create any of these three templates you need to select ‘Other Options’ in the create site page.
When you create a team site in the modern view you will automatically get an Office 365 group created with it. This
means you will get a shared email address for the site and also the ability to make it public or private viewable by
users in the organisation.
A communication site does not create an Office 365 group and connect be connected to one, it is also possible to
create a modern team site without a group but in order to do that you will need to use the SharePoint PNP
extensions and use the extension command New-PnPTenantSite. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell
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/module/sharepoint-pnp/new-pnptenantsite?view=sharepoint-ps
You can also create a new site collection in modern from the SharePoint dashboard. Launching the SharePoint App
from the app launcher or from your Office 365 home page will send you to the dashboard landing page. From here
you can create a new site collection which by default is a modern team site or communication site.
It is possible to disable this ‘create site’ option in the tenant settings, more on that in the final module.
The SharePoint App dashboard is also a great place to manage and access your favourite site collections, most
commonly used and ones you have been invited to. Users can also download the mobile app from here in order to
have access to a mobile rendered dashboard designed for mobile devices.
To create a classic site collection in the admin interface (you will cover the PowerShell method later) you go to the
classic site collections page in SharePoint administration from the ‘More features’ link and select ‘New’ then ‘Private
Site Collection’
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There are several options now when creating the site collection:
• Title – user a title that is both meaningful and discoverable (Think delve)
• Web Address – Every site collection and site forms part of a url hierarchy which will start with your tenant url, eg.
Yourcompany.shartepoint.com. You can create your new site collection from one of two defined managed paths,
Sites and Teams. Therefore, the full URL of your new site will be something like
https://cktenant.sharepoint.com/sites/HR assuming that my new site collection is called HR
• Template selection – You can create a site collection using a different language set such as a Welsh site which
will enable business that have multi lingual requirements to support both English and Welsh sites.
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There is a choice of templates that are provided by default and split into 4 categories:
o Collaboration
◼ Team Site (Classic experience) – General Collaboration
Blog – Company or departmental blog site
Developer Site – Specific site for testing custom development
Project Site – has specific project focused collaboration lists
Community Site – site focusing on discussion threads
o Enterprise
◼ Document Center – structured data repository
◼ eDiscovery Center – used for Search – Hold – Export and litigation cases
◼ Records Center – Structured repository for declared records
Team Site – SharePoint Online configuration – site ready built to support internal and external sharing
Business Intelligence Center – uses data web parts to present data sources
Compliance Policy Center – Define policies to delete documents based on retention policies
◼ Enterprise Search Center – customizable business wide search template with query and results based
customizable results.
◼ My Site Host – Used as default location for mysite creation, one is already created by default in your
tenant.
Community Portal – Aggregation site for community sites, you would normally only create one of these.
◼ Basic Search Center – used for simple search queries targeted as specific users / sites
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◼ Visio Process Repository – storage and viewing location for multiple types of business process Visio
diagrams.
o Publishing
◼ Publishing Portal – Has publishing features enabled and allows Intranet style pages to be created and
page content editing plus extra site collection administration options specifically aimed at publishing
features.
Enterprise Wiki – A simple page editing and content categorization template used for simple knowledge
<Select Template Later> - Allows a site collection administrator to choose the template when they first
◼ Other customer templates will be displayed here that your company may have created.
• Time Zone – The ability to create multiple site collections but time stamps will be used in the time zone specified
including calendar entries.
• Administrator – The default Site Collection administrator also used for notification alerts. Can be changed later
and more administrators can be added through site collection settings.
• Server Resource Quota – This feature is now deprecated out of SharePoint Online and is not used. It was
previously used for site collection feature code deployment called sandboxed solutions. As this is no longer
supported the value can be set to 0
After creating a site collection, it will take a few minutes to refresh in the admin console and you will notice it lists
basic information including storage used and quota however resource quota can be ignored.
We have now looked at the two ways that site collections can be created either as Modern or classic templates.
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From a hybrid and migration perspective some companies may still prefer to use certain collaboration spaces as
classic due to the various web parts that only work in classic at this time, but as Microsoft expands the web part
options for modern then it will eventually become better to use Modern site templates for every site created.
If you have no need to use some of the classic web parts however it is recommended to use the modern templates.
Define Ownership and Security
When designing your ownership and security model it is important to understand the differences between the
options available from the SharePoint Admin center and those options available from within the site collection itself.
Most of the same options are available in both classic and the new preview admin center. However for the new
preview admin center you need to select a site collection and select the information pane to see the options
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From the information panel you can change the following options:
• Primary Administrator – classic site
• Site Collection Administrators – classic site
• Group owners – modern site
• External Sharing
• Hub Site Management
SharePoint administrator options
There are several options for managing classic site collections that are not available in the modern administrator
center. One of these is the addition of support partner admins. In order to manage this you will need to select a site
collection in the classic admin center.
There are two options available from the admin center for configuring site collection administrators, which includes
the following two options:
• Manage Administrators
• Add Support Partner
Manage Administrators is where you can view, change or add site collection administrators or you can also change
the original ‘Primary Site Collection’ administrator that you defined when you created the site collection.
To add an additional site collection administrator simply add them to the user list and then confirm them using the
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people picker, alternatively you can find them through the address book.
You can also add the users with SharePoint’s PowerShell commands. There is more on this subject later in this
module.
The other option is to add a Support Partner; this allows companies that have an external IT company managing its
tenant to give them access to managing your site collections and SharePoint remotely. Think of it as a delegation of
control option. There are two levels of roles that you can associate from your tenant administration groups:
Foreign Principal – ‘TenantAdmins’ – Full control
Foreign Principal – ‘HelpdeskAdmins’ – A cross service group which by default only has view rights and reset user
passwords. Additional rights can be assigned if required.
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When considering adding Administrators and partner roles also consider health monitoring. Reports and health are
all part of the tenant administration and you can give users access to those management pages via the service
administrator role in your tenant.
Once a site collection has been created you can then define more site collection administrators or site owners via
the permissions tab in the site collection. To do this go to your site collection home page and then go to ‘site
settings’ via the management cog. In the site settings page go to the ‘site permissions’ page. Here you can manage
the group model and membership of your site collection and if you want to add additional site collection
administrators go to the ‘site collection administrators’ link.
Select or find the users and click ok to add them to the group.
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It is important to remember that the Owner group in a site collection is not the same group as site collection
administers, the Owner group is specific to the site group structure which by default is inherited by sub sites but this
inheritance can be broken in sub sites if required. Therefore, if you require a person to have access to the whole
site collection regardless of group permissions ensure you make them site collection administrators such as an
eDiscovery user.
There are four groups available by default:
• Excel Services Viewers – View only rights
• Team Site Members – Content edit rights
• Team Site owners – Full control
• Team Site Visitors – Read only group
If you require you can create your own group model in site collections by selecting the ‘Create Group’ option in the
ribbon and then defining the permission levels that the group has. It would not be advisable to create too many
custom groups as that could cause a management overhead and possible user management confusion but it is
useful for specific defined roles within an organisation. Other users can even request access to the group and if you
choose you can let them join the group automatically or have it work through a workflow.
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The final option for security access is the ‘Access Request Settings’. This option allows you to define who receives
requests to access a site and then grant them based on a group defined:
One of the challenges for administrators once security and permissions have been assigned is to keep on top of
user rights. A nice feature of SharePoint online user rights management is the check permissions feature.
By adding a user or a group into the lookup box you are able to see what rights a user has to a site by the groups
they belong to and then what each permission is that they can perform on the site.
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Configuring Storage
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For SharePoint online you receive 1Tb of default storage per tenant by default which can be expanded to 5 TB per
user, it is possible however to request up to 25TB per user via the Microsoft support system. By default, SharePoint
online will manage these storage limits automatically and if you reach your storage limit it will require you to either
delete storage via documents / recycle bin or you can purchase more.
If you prefer you can manually manage and set your storage quotas, this is achieved by changing the Site
Collection Storage Management from Automatic to manual in the SharePoint settings page:
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Once you have enabled manual storage you will now get a new button option when you select a site collection to
‘set a storage quota’
Once enabled your site collection list in SharePoint will update with new columns showing storage quota limits and
percentage used.
If you reach a situation where you need to grow beyond your default amount of storage then you can add more.
The Billing administrator will be able to add more storage from the ‘purchase services’ option in the main
administration center.
**Note** you may need to switch to the legacy admin centre to see all the options for available purchases.
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Configure External Access
One of the options available for SharePoint collaboration is allowing users outside of your organisation to access
content in your tenant document libraries or sites. Allowing external access is enabled or disabled at the Tenant
level and further refined at the SharePoint Site level.
External Sharing can be configured in both the modern and classic admin pages however there a few extra options
available for the site level in classic.
It is possible to see which site collections have been changed with sharing options by looking at the Resources –
Sites page for a high-level overview.
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In order to view or change your SharePoint tenant settings you need to open the ‘Sharing’ page in the SharePoint
Admin center There are several options for allowing external access and who can receive the links to content
depending on how you want security to be controlled. The default sliders control external sharing for SharePoint
and OneDrive however OneDrive cannot be set to be more open than SharePoint so if you want OneDrive users to
be able to share with new and existing guests then SharePoint needs to be set to the same.
You have 4 options for creating links to content when users share an object:
• Only people in your organisation – No Sharing allowed
• Existing Guests – must have guest access configured in Azure AD
• New and Existing – users can invite guests who are not in Azure AD
• Anyone – Anyone with the link
In the classic management page only you can control additional access options:
• Limit sharing using domain names – Also available at the site level in classic.
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• Prevent externally invited users from sharing invitations from sites where they are not an owner.
• External users invited must authenticate to the link / site with the same email address the invitation was sent to.
Limit Sharing using domain names
You have two options for this setting, allow sharing but only to the following domains listed or allow all except for
these domains which have been blacklisted. After you select the checkbox for limiting the sharing option you are
presented with a text box where you can add domains that you want to allow sharing with. For example in this box I
have allowed the domain combined-knowledge.com to receive invitations.
Alternatively you can allow all external except those blacklisted such as this example which is blocking users from
the several external domains from getting external access
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You can add as many domains to either option as you wish just ensure you have a space separating each domain
or they will not be applied.
Prevent external users from Sharing files and folders and sites – Classic Option
By default if you invite an external user to an object in a SharePoint site they can then re-share that content
possibly to other external users. Therefore to prevent that happening by selecting this checkbox unless they
actually own the object in question they cannot share any other content. This selection would need to fall within
your planned governance model but if you are not sure what level of access you want external users to have at the
start then this could be a good way to start with external sharing but limiting what external users can do.
External users must use the same account invitations are sent to
This option allows control of invitations sent to specific users whereby if the user has been invited via their main
company email then they must sign in to the link they receive using that account.
In the following example a Site is being shared to brian.alderman@mindsharp.com and therefore Brian must use
that email address account when authenticating to the shared link. It is also important to note that if the user has
sent the invitation as an anonymous link then no authentication is needed therefore the account name is not
required.
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There are also notifications enabled by default that will let OneDrive owners know when links to content in
OneDrive is shared by external users and when external users accept invitations to content.
As well as setting tenant level Sharing options you can also override the options on a per site collection basis. This
can be done on both the modern and classic maangement pages for sharing. Simply select your chosen site and
go to the sharing options page.
To configure external sharing from the modern admin center you need to select the site collection in the Active sites
list and then click on the i information button in the top menu bar
Once selected, go to the policies tab and you can now edit the external sharing options.
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Recovering Site Collections
In SharePoint Online there are not many options when it comes to recovery of your site collections. The basic
principal is that everything that is deleted where possible will be transferred to a recycle bin. The object will remain
in the recycle bin until it is either restored or permanently deleted if the recycle bin timestamp has been reached.
By default, deleted site collections remain in the recycle bin for 93 days after the 93 days it is permanently deleted.
You can manually remove site collections before the 93 days if you wish in order to free up more storage space for
example but they will not be recoverably without MS support beyond that point.
The Support team can recover items to a point in time such as site collections and sites if you require but this is a
very expensive exercise and should only be requested if it is business critical. Unfortunately, there is currently no
way to do manual backups and restores using tools like PowerShell. Some 3 rd party companies offer an offsite
backup / restore option but they are limited just as you are. You can obviously, export data out of SharePoint using
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file copy / migration tools but unlike on premises where you have complete control of backups this is not the case
with SharePoint Online.
It is also important to note that not everything can be recovered from the recycle bin, for example: If a user has
added a custom column to a list and that list contained data but the custom column has now been deleted, that
data Is not in the recycle bin and the only way to get it back would be to call MS support and get them to restore it
to a point in time.
By default, Microsoft backs up Site Collections every 12 hours and keeps the backups for 14 days, so you can
basically get to a point of time within 12 hours if needed but it will overwrite your existing site collection and can
take up to 2 days to process.
When you delete a site collection it will list it in the recycle bin along with the amount of days remaining before it is
purged:
If you are not sure if you want it to be purged at this time and you have spare capacity in your storage, then you
could restore the site collection then delete it again in order to gain another 93 days or build a retention policy in the
compliancy center to hold the site.
Ensure you never exceed your storage as this would stop all site collections from getting new content or you need
to purchase more storage as explained earlier in this module.
Managing Site Collections with PowerShell
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Although a lot of management can be done with SharePoint in the Admin console there are always additional
management and configuration options that can be achieved via the command line. The Command line is always a
way that Microsoft can easily add additional functionality into a product or service without having to go through a UI
change as well. It is therefore always useful to stay on top of any new commands that are released. This is a good
page to start with when checking -
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161388.aspx
There are several areas that you may also want to look into apart from administration, such as managing groups
and security or configuring health and reporting.
It is important to remember that you must be a SharePoint Online global administrator in order to connect and run
PowerShell commands and have installed the SharePoint Management Shell module and the pre-requisites as
discussed in the previous module.
You do not have to use the SharePoint Online Management shell either, if you want to use other tools like
PowerShell ISE that is actually better, just remember to load the various modules into the command shell before
running any commands.
One the following pages is the complete list of supported PowerShell commandlets at the time of writing for
SharePoint Online.
Also note that in order to manage new features, modern templates and extended capabilities you may need to
download and install the PowerShell PNP extension https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint
/dev/community/community
Cmdlet name Description
Add-SPOUser Adds an existing Office 365 user or an Office 365 security group to a
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SharePoint group.
Connect-SPOService Connects a SharePoint Online global administrator to a SharePoint Online

connection (the SharePoint Online Administration Center). This cmdlet must be
run before any other SharePoint Online cmdlets can run.
Disconnect-SPOService Disconnects from a SharePoint Online service.
Get-SPOAppErrors Returns application errors.
Get-SPOAppInfo Returns all installed applications.
Get-SPODeletedSite Returns all deleted site collections that are in the Recycle Bin.
Get-SPOExternalUser Returns external users that are located in the tenant's folder based on specified
criteria.
Get-SPOSite Returns one or more site collections.
Get-SPOSiteGroup Returns all the groups on the specified site collection.
Get-SPOTenant Returns SharePoint Online organization properties.
Get-SPOTenantLogEntry Retrieves SharePoint Online company logs.
Get- SPOTenantLogLastAvailableTimeInUtc Returns the time when the SharePoint Online organization logs are collected.
Get-SPOTenantSyncClientRestriction Returns the current tenant configuration status.
Get-SPOUser Returns the SharePoint Online user or security group accounts that match
given search criteria.
Get-SPOWebTemplate Shows all site templates that match the given identity.
New-SPOSite Creates a new SharePoint Online site collection for the current company.
New-SPOSiteGroup Creates a new group in a SharePoint Online site collection.
Remove-SPODeletedSite Removes a SharePoint Online deleted site collection from the Recycle Bin.
Remove-SPOExternalUser Permanently removes a collection of external users from the tenant’s folder.
Remove-SPOSite Sends a SharePoint Online site collection to the SharePoint Online Recycle
Bin.
Remove-SPOSiteGroup Removes a SharePoint Online group from a site collection.
Remove- Disables the feature for the tenancy.
Remove-SPOUser Removes a user or a security group from a site collection or a group.
Repair-SPOSite Checks and repairs the specified site collection and its contents.
Request-SPOUpgradeEvaluationSite Requests to create a copy of an existing site collection for the purposes of
validating the effects of upgrade without affecting the original site.
Restore-SPODeletedSite Restores a SharePoint Online deleted site collection from the Recycle Bin.
Set-SPOSite Sets or updates the values of one or more properties for a site collection.
Set-SPOSiteGroup Updates the SharePoint Online owner and permission level on a group inside a
site collection.
Set-SPOTenant Sets properties on the SharePoint Online organization.
Set-SPOTenantSyncClientRestriction Enables the tenancy and sets the domain GUIDs.
Set-SPOUser Configures properties on an existing user.
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Test-SPOSite Tests a SharePoint Online site collection.
Upgrade-SPOSite Starts the upgrade process on a site collection.
One of the most common commands will be creating objects in PowerShell such as new site collections. These
commands are very straight forward although you can save some repeat typing by using variables. Variables are
where you would start a command by a dollar symbol at the start that way you can use it later in the script as long
as the variable is still in memory.
$Site1=New-SPOSite -Url https://ck365.sharepoint.com/sites/hr -Owner steve@ck365.com -StorageQuota 1024
By creating the site collection with a variable attached to it I could then use the variable to bring that site collection
into another command such as adding a second site collection administrator or a custom group.
You can use .CSV files as a way to create multiple site collections and apply specific variables to them all in one go,
for example:
Import-Csv .\NewSPOSites.csv| % {New-SPOSite -Owner $_.Owner -StorageQuota $_.StorageQuota -Url $_.Url

-NoWait -Template $_.Template -Title $_.Name}
When working with PowerShell it can be beneficial to combine several commands along with the use of variables in
order to speed up or make changes to several site collections at one. For example: you want to get a list of the
current site collection administrator for every current site collection, you then want to change the primary site
collection administrator to a new one for every site collection. This can easily be achieved in PowerShell using only
a few commands but not so quick if using the admin console.
Connect https://ck365-admin.sharepoint.com
Get-SPOSite |
$SiteUrls=(Get-SPOSite).Url
foreach($url in $SiteUrls) { Set-SPOSite -Identity $url -Owner steve@ck365.com}
Get-SPOSite | Select url, owner
Also with PowerShell when working with several locations and object types you may wish to work within a file such
as a .CSV and then import or export the values into SharePoint. This can be achieved using commands like:
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Get-SPOSite | select url, owner | export-csv c:\users\steve\Desktop\spsiteowner.csv
Module Summary
In this module you have looked in detail at configuring SharePoint Online Site Collections including storage and
management and you have covered the following topics:
• classic and modern site management
• Understanding the topology of Site Collections
• Creating Site Collections
• Defining ownership and security for Site Collections
• Configuring Storage
• Configure External Access to Site Collections
• Recovering Site Collections
• Managing Site Collections with PowerShell
36 of 36 28/08/2020, 14:11

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Working with Site Collections https://www.skillpipe.com/api/2/content/ddc18610-51f2-4a12-96c1-0d8...

Working with Site Collections

Classic and modern site management

Converting classic sites to modern

Creating Site Collections

Creating a Site Collection

Define Ownership and Security

SharePoint administrator options

Configure External Access

Limit Sharing using domain names

Recovering Site Collections

Managing Site Collections with PowerShell

Therefore, in this module you will focus on the following topics:

• Classic and modern site management

• Understanding the topology of site collections

• Creating Site Collections

• Defining ownership and security for Site Collections

• Configure External Access to Site Collections

• Recovering Site Collections

• Managing Site Collections with PowerShell

Classic and modern site management

SharePoint Framework overview - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/sharepoint-

Converting classic sites to modern

This can be achieved in one of 3 ways:

• Using the SharePoint page transformation UI (preview)

• Use Visual Studio and the .Net Framework engine

Creating Site Collections

• 1 TB + 10GB per user

• 5,000 item list view & 12 lookup columns per view

• 25TB storage per site collection

• 500,000 site collections

• 2,000 subsites per site collection

• Recycle Bin size takes storage from available storage.

• Single collaboration site collection – many subsites

• Multiple site collections no subsites

• Multiple site collections each with their own subsites

Creating a Site Collection

o Used for standard collaboration

o Used to create business and departmental intranet and comms sites.

• Enterprise Publishing Portal

• Project Web App site.

◼ Team Site (Classic experience) – General Collaboration

Blog – Company or departmental blog site

Developer Site – Specific site for testing custom development

Project Site – has specific project focused collaboration lists

Community Site – site focusing on discussion threads

◼ Document Center – structured data repository

◼ Records Center – Structured repository for declared records

Define Ownership and Security

• Primary Administrator – classic site

• Site Collection Administrators – classic site

• Group owners – modern site

• Hub Site Management

SharePoint administrator options

• Add Support Partner

Foreign Principal – ‘TenantAdmins’ – Full control

There are four groups available by default:

• Excel Services Viewers – View only rights

• Team Site Members – Content edit rights

• Team Site owners – Full control

• Team Site Visitors – Read only group

Configure External Access

• Only people in your organisation – No Sharing allowed