Sharepoint 2010 - Questions regarding basic concepts

Question

I am beginning sharepoint development and have some quick questions concerning basic terms.

1. How do i find out whether a particular site is a site collection, or a site JUST BY THE URL? Is their a powershell command to do this?

2. I was creating some sites in sharepoint. Some sites were appended with /sites/sitename whereas others were just under the base url of sharepoint. What is the difference between the 2? AND, how do i recreate the ones under the sites node? For some reason, I cant find the option to create under the sites node again. Please explain this concept as all msdn tutorial are very confusion for beginners like me. Those are good once you get the hang of basics.

3. Please provide an analogy how to understand web app, site collection, site, web site, etc.

4. Is there a way to use NEWFORM.aspx for a document library instead of UPLOAD.aspx?

Answer 1

1. The Site collection is at the root level of your Web application. So http://abc.com/ => Site collection Using Powershell, open the Sharepoint Powershell prompt and run Get-SPSite to get all Site-Collections

2. the /sites/ is called as a managed path It can be defined in the Central Administration for every web application. The option to select the /sites will be available only when you create the second site collection under the Web Application (The first one take the / by default.)

3. Have a look at Technet Article

4. document library is for uploading file, not for storing user submitted data, for that you need to create a list

Answer 2

1) Document Set is used in cases where multiple documents have the same properties, its like putting all these documents in a folder and then providing attributes to that folder which are in turn applied for each document in that folder. In your case, if all the files have the same values for the 8 fields then the document set is the correct way to go.

2)If there is additional metadata associated with the files then these can be added either to the content type (eg. document or document set content type) or to the columns in the library itself, you dont need to create a separate list for holding that data. Adding data to the content type ensures consistency across all the document libraries within that site collection, adding columns to the library affects only that library.