Private cloud computing is a viable option for enterprise business in 2013. SharePoint Server 2010 offers a portal site capability. Many organizations in the market for a private cloud may want to consider SharePoint Server 2010 as the foundation for a solution. When site collections are connected via a top level portal site collection, the experience of a private cloud can be delivered to a community of SharePoint 2010 users.
In a video tutorial titled Setting up a Portal Site Connection, Asif Rehmani, SharePoint MVP and MCT demonstrates how to set up this portal site collection feature. The intended audience for this video tutorial are SharePoint Administrators, including site collection administrators.
The obstacle to providing SharePoint users with a private cloud experience, as Asif mentions at the start of this video, is the apparent disconnected nature of site collections in a typical SharePoint implementation. This experience can be transformed by tying a range of site collections together into ” . . . one central hierarchy” (quoted from the video tutorial mentioned above, a link to which has been provided in this post). The steps required include viewing the “Site Settings” screen, clicking on the “Portal Site Connection” link under “Site Collection Administration”.
From the “Portal Site Connection” screen, another site collection can be added, to provide the desired result, one portal comprised of all of the sites included in the two site collections. The point of connection is the top level site of the second site collection. The connection is accomplished by entering the URL for this top level site in the form box for the “Connect to Portal Site” setting, along with a name for the connection, which will appear in the portal site navigation bar.
Once the two site collections have been connected, the breadcrumb trail will be modified to provide users with access, in a hierarchy, to either of the site collections. In the example provided in this video tutorial, the second site collection takes the position of the highest level of the tow in the breadcrumb trail. SharePoint Administrators should keep this arrangement in mind as they plan how to connect site collections to create a private portal for users.
The very same process can be followed by My Site owners who wish to connect a My Site to site collections to build a portal.
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