Confusing WSS terminology

I still find that people get confused when talking WSS terminology – hell – I even confused myself a few times (probably more due to my terrible memory).

I spent time yesterday re-iterating through some of the core-theory around WSS and MOSS, and thought it would be a good idea to clear up some of the terminology for people – and what better place to do it than on my blog?

Why do people get confused?

Simple – between the transition from SharePoint Team Services v1.0 (STS) -> Windows SharePoint Services V2.0 -> Windows SharePoint Services V3.0 + Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) there was a lot of confusion around terminology – they let some of the words which originated in STS and V2.0 stick around (mostly due to the object model, which they did not want to re-write due to backwards compatibility issues). To make it even more confusing, some of those words then went on to take different meanings in the forward versions. Don’t worry, though – there’s some good news in all of this:

The terminology is quite simple!

Let me start from the very top, and make our way down to the few parts which cause most confusion.

Old Term (<WSS v2.0)		New Term (WSS v3.0+MOSS)		Description	OM (All Versions)
Virtual Server		Web Application		In the previous version, we had the concept of a virtual server – a virtual server was a WSS hosted IIS web site.   In the new version – a web application is referred to as being an IIS Web site which is hosting WSS. The object model representation stays the same in all cases – we still need to use a collection of SPVirtualServer’s – these are your web applications.	SPVirtualServer
Site		Site Collection		In the previous version, we had what we referred to as a ‘Site’. A Site was essentially a container which held an aggregation of webs. The term site collection was still used interchangeably in the previous version, but today we should always refer to it as a site collection. Unfortunately we still have the confusion of the object model which refers to a site collection as an SPSite.	SPSite
Web		Site		Here’s the kicker. This one is where people generally find themselves getting confused. In the prior version there was a concept of a web – which was the actual object used to maintain lists, template and layout information, knew how to render itself, and more importantly, contained any child webs associated with it.   Today, we know these as sites. The confusion sets in between site collections and what we refer to today as sites. As previously a site would be known as a site collection. What we have done in the latest version is to make the naming more explicit and meaningful – rather than having terms such as site pointing to definitions of something that it does not clearly represent.	SPWeb
Root Web		Top-Level Site		In the previous version, each site (site collection) needed to have at least one web associated with it. That is, for every site there must be at least one ‘root web’. A site collection on its own is nothing but a container, with some other broad information associated with it. There is no way that a site collection itself can be rendered – it is an abstract concept. This is why for every site collection that was built, we needed at least one web to go along with it.   Today, we have cleared the terminology up once again, and we now refer to a root web as a top level site. It is the top-most site, in a collection of sites and sub-sites. It’s the very first site that we receive when we create/provision a site collection.	SPSite -> RootWeb

 

So in summary – in the previous version we had virtual servers sitting at the top, each virtual server could have multiple sites, each site would contain at least one web (root web) and each web could have multiple child-webs.

But we now have in the new version, web applications sitting at the top level, each web application can contain multiple site collections, each site collection has one top level site, and each top level site can then have multiple sub-sites.

Across all versions, the object model has been left using the old terminology, so even today we still refer to an SPSite for a site collection, or an SPWeb for a site.

I hope this has cleared it up for you, and not confused things even further J