1 of 2 - SharePoint: Creating Site Collections

To create your Site Collections, head over to your SharePoint. The URL should be https://xxx.sharepoint.com/SitePages/Home.aspx where xxx is the name of your SharePoint.

Click the App launcher on the top left. 

Then click on Admin.

This will open a new tab in your web browser and take you to the Microsoft 365 admin center. 

From here, click on Show all on the left side. 

Then click on SharePoint, near the bottom of the expanded list. 

This will open a new tab in your web browser.

Click on Active sites.

This will open up a list of all of your existing Site Collections. 

From here, click on Create.

It will bring a dialogue that looks like this. 

Click on Other options at the bottom. 

It will bring up this dialogue. 

First, choose your template.

You can search on Google what are the differences between each SharePoint template, and choose which one suits your needs. 

For our example, we will select the Document Center template. 

Next, you should enter the name of your site by entering it in the Site name field. 

THIS IS A CRUCIAL STEP

Due to Microsofts limitation of 2,000 lists and libraries combined per site collection (including the main site and any subsites), to determine your limitation is to find out how many clients and cases you have combined.

We recommend using a name, followed by a number. These numbers should follow based on the year, month, and days. Again, depending on how many cases/clients (in total) you get on a yearly basis. 

Here are some examples of what you can use for the numbering.

• Year
  • • Full Year
      • • 4 digits = 2023
        • 2 digits = 23
    • Half Year
      • • 01 or 02
    • Quarterly 
      • • 1 through 4
• Month
  • • 01 through 12
• Days
  • • 01 through 31

This part is important and crucial, as you will need to remember the site collection name and update the LEX247 Control Panel configuration for your SharePoint integration later. 

Before you decide what numbering system you need, you should calculate your list of clients and cases that you get, then consider the Microsoft limitation of 2,000 per site and sub-sites. Allow for some buffer space in case you do exceed this amount at any given time. If a site collection exceeds 2,000 they will not be created. If your clients and cases are much higher than that in a shorter time frame, you can use the other codes to create more site collections. 

If you require help determining this, you can ask for help from our support team at support@lex247.com

For our example, we will assume we obtain less than 2,000 clients and cases yearly. We will name the site, "documents" in our example. 

We would enter the name as documents2023. 

You will see that a new field has dropped down. 

This will tell you if the site address is available. In our example, it is available. 

You can select either /sites/ or /teams/. In terms of set up, there is no difference but will depend on how you would like it setup. In our example, we will use /sites/.

The next step is to enter the name of your Primary Administrator. Enter the name of a SharePoint Administrator, or your SharePoint Service Account name. 

You can click on Advanced settings to bring up two additional options to set the Time zone and an optional Site description. 

Once you are done, click on Finish.

This will create the Site Collection and you should see it in the list. 

Depending on your numbering system, you will need to create multiple site collections. In our example, we created documents2023, where 2023 is for the year 2023... you will need to create multiple site collections now for other years, so that you do not need to do this every year. It is recommended to ensure that there are no issues in case you forget to create the site collection. 

So, in our example, we will create 5 years' worth of site collections in advance. You can do more if you wish. We will repeat the process and create site collections until 2028. 

Once you have created your site collections, you can go ahead and update the SharePoint configuration in LEX247. Please read the following article SharePoint: Updating Settings for Site Collections.