SharePoint Hierarchy

Understanding the SharePoint Hierarchy

At the top of the hierarchy are SharePoint Farms. This encompasses all the physical servers that comprise your SP installation. It may consist of one server or twenty. When you run the SharePoint Product Configuration wizard after installing, you either create a new server farm or connect to an existing one. It’s done once.

Once you have your server farm you must set up a web application. This is what creates a corresponding website in IIS to host the site. This is where it gets its application pool and other IIS properties. You can create multiple web applications on a server farm.

Now you have a hollow web application but nothing else. Enter site collections. It is simply a collection of SharePoint sites inside the web application. Here you define a top-level site. You can have multiple site collections.

From your site collection you have a top-level site that will have multiple sites underneath it. This is the common SP interface seen by end users.

And finally we have the content inside the sites. This includes (but not limited to) lists, libraries, web parts, etc.