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Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services allows members of the Administrator and Web Designer roles to create subsites from their Web sites. These subsites can be fully functioning SharePoint sites, complete with a home page, document libraries, and so on — they can even have their own unique permissions. Self-Service Site Creation is a feature that is enabled by administrators and allows users to create their own top-level Web sites. Users do not need administrator permissions on the server or virtual server, only permissions on the Web site where Self-Service Site Creation is hosted. Users simply enters some basic information to create their own top-level Web sites automatically.
You turn on Self-Service Site Creation from the Configure Self-Service Site Creation page for the virtual server that you want to enable. When you turn on Self-Service Site Creation, an announcement is added to the home page of the top-level Web site on that virtual server, with a link to the signup page (Scsignup.aspx). Users can click the link to go to the signup page and create their sites. This announcement is set to appear indefinitely, but if the Announcements list is long, or is removed from the home page of your site, the announcement may not appear. If you want to ensure that the link always appears on the home page, you can customize the home page in a Web page editor compatible with Windows SharePoint Services to include the link in a prominent position, such as the top link bar.
Self-Service Site Creation allows users to create and manage their own top-level Web sites automatically. This capability can obviously affect the security for your Web server running Windows SharePoint Services. Self-Service Site Creation is disabled by default — you must turn on the feature to use it. You enable Self-Service Site Creation for a single virtual server at a time. If you want to use it on all virtual servers in your server farm, you must enable it for every virtual server individually.
The Administration pages for Self-Service Site Creation are part of the virtual server administration pages, which can only be accessed by local computer administrators or members of the SharePoint administrators group. Access to the signup page follows the same security rules as other Web site pages. By default, the Use Self-Service Site Creation right is included in all site groups except the Guest site group, and gives users access to the signup page and the ability to use Self-Service Site Creation to create their own top-level Web sites.
Note that because Self-Service Site Creation simply creates new top-level Web sites on an existing virtual server, any new sites automatically conform to the virtual server's quota settings, unused Web site notification settings, and other administrative policies.
By default, when you install Windows SharePoint Services, a URL path called /sites is added to your virtual server. When you enable Self-Service Site Creation, that path is the default path for sites that your users create. For example, using Self-Service Site Creation, a user can create "MyTeamSite" on Server 1. Using the defaults, the path for this site would be similar to the following: http://server/sites/MyTeamSite. You can use the default /sites path for user's sites, or you can create additional paths. By adding managed paths, you can specify which URL paths are available for Self-Service Site Creation users to create sites under. If you do add more URL paths for Self-Service Site Creation use, when users go to the Scsignup.aspx page, they will see a drop-down menu listing the various paths available, and they can choose under which path to create their site. For more information about defining a URL path, see About Managed Paths.