Site Collection Consolidation

Site Collection consolidation is an interesting topic, and in my opinion one that bears some significant consideration before proceeding.  Why this article?  I recently worked with a client who wanted to consolidate from 50+ Site Collections to ~3.  The reason, the number of site collections seemed unmanageable at that point.  There was a only a single Content Database as well.  So since then I've been putting more and more thought in to the issue.  Here's some of the talking points:

Size:

• Microsoft recommends limiting content databases to 200 GB.
• Each site collection may reside in a single content database
• Thus recommend maximum size for a site collection is also 200 GB.

Security:

• Site Collections represent a monolithic security context, i.e. they do not inherit permissions from other objects.
• One object may be that a Site Collection inherits the ability to provide anonymous access from the Web Application that surrounds it.
• Site Collections inherit the authentication mechanism(s) defined by the Web App.
• Neither of these are permissions, but rather mechanical 'illities that are granted to the Site Collection by it's parent Web App.

Content and Navigation:

• With Publishing Infrastructure (SharePoint Enterprise), navigation can be auto-generated based on the Site-Subsite relationships
• Automatic security trimming based user access
• Publishing based navigation doesn't cross the Site Collection boundary
• I'm not sure if this is good or bad.  I'm usually building single tenant intranet sites, so this isn't a plus, but recently I've had a chance to work with a client who provides SharePoint sites to multiple tenants, and this feature is a plus.
• SharePoint 2013 brought about pinned Managed Metadata for navigation.
• Each site collection requires a copy of the pinned data, which can clutter the metadata tree.
• Security Trimming doesn't occur here

 

• Lists that refer to other lists only occur with in a single site collection.
• Again more of a problem for a single tenant with lots of site collections, a requirement for one collection per tenant.
• Controls that pull resources like XSLT from inside the SharePoint Web structure can't access content from other Site Collections.
• You'll need to duplicate those resources across collections.
• Master Pages must be installed in each site collection.
• Pages can't reference a master page from another collection.

So next post, more on Issues with Consolidating Site Collections.