MOSS 2007 - Creating a Site Collection

I am not going into any details. If you want to learn about site collections, there are probably many other good places but if you are a beginner who have just installed MOSS 2007 and now you are looking to create a top level site in MOSS 2007, then here are the initial steps.

If you are still stuck with the MOSS installation and setup, then you may find the following post useful, it shows you how to setup MOSS from scratch. The following post also discusses the pre-requisites and places from where you can download the pre-requisites:

MOSS 2007 (Beta 2) Setup

After the setup and configuration is complete, you will be presented with a SharePoint Central Administration screen. Your first task is to enable some important services on the server. Click on the "Operations" tab and then select "Services on server".

You will see a screen similar to the following:

Select "Single Server or Web Server for small server farms" if you are using a single machine for your deployment. Start the services shown in red boxes in the figure shown above. These services are: Office SharePoint Server Search and Windows SharePoint Services Web Application.

You can also create "Shared Services" for your farm. SharePoint will automatically create shared services for the site collection you will create but if you want to see how shared services are created then follow the instructions shown next.

Click on the "Application Management" tab and then click "Create or configure this farm's shared services" link (encircled in red in the figure shown below).

You will be presented with the following screen:

You can see in the figure above that I have already created a couple of shared services. Click on the "New SSP" link to create a new shared service, this will open a new page. Most of the fields in this page will already have been populated with default values.  Enter a name in the "SSP Name" field and select your newly created application from the "Web application" drop down. Enter your username and password in the "SSP Service Credentials".

SharePoint will automatically add a name for the database that will be created for the shared service. You can change this name if you want. You can select a database authentication method. Windows authentication is the recommended option but you can also use SQL authentication. A search database will also be created and you will have the option to rename this database. Select authentication method for this database and finally, you will have to select an index server. In my case, it is the SQL server that hosts my SharePoint DBs. If you have a separate index server, you can choose it in the "Index Server" drop down, otherwise, choose the default SQL server and click "OK".

Now, you can start creating a web application. Select "Application Management" tab and click on "Create or extend Web application".

Select "Create a new Web Application" next.

In the next screen, you will set lot of properties. Start with IIS Web Site. Create a new IIS web site, enter description in the "Description" field. Select a port other than 80 if you already have an application running on port 80. Path is auto selected and you can change the destination but I would recommend the default location to be used. Have a look at the screen below. You can copy values exactly from this screen. Use your userid and password for application pool identity. Similarly, select an authentication type for database and provide security credentials. Finally, hit OK to continue.

Now that you have created a web site, it's time to create a top level site or site collection for your portal. You can name it as "Portal" and the URL will be http://portal if you created web site on port 80. Select "Application Management" tab and then select "Create site collection" link in "SharePoint Site Management" section.

This will bring up a new page where you will have the option to select a web site. Select your newly created web application by clicking the arrow in the dropdown box.

Select "Create site at this URL:" option to create a site collection on the root of the web site you created. In this case, your final URL will look like:

http://portal

and if you select "Create site under this URL" then your URL will look like: http://portal/sites/mysite.

Provide a name for primary site collection administrator. In templates, select "Corporate Intranet Site" (Click "Publishing" tab to select this template) template and click OK.

Here is how your portal site will look like: