The popularity of SharePoint as a collaboration tool has understandably skyrocketed in recent years. With its sheer volume of user empowerment, the collaborative adoption scenarios are almost endless. However, the novelty of elevated user empowerment can quickly erode if you are required to maintain any sort of control, standardization, or guidance for your SharePoint environment. For those first starting to tackle SharePoint head on, this is a daunting task. Several different means are available to help you gain the upper hand in your environment. One such avenue is the deployment and use of site definitions.

What Is a Site Definition?

The best way to think about site definitions is to envision them as master site templates for your SharePoint environment. No, these aren’t the site templates you find in your site collection’s template gallery. The site templates you create and store in your gallery have their place in SharePoint processes but are localized to the site collection level. Site definitions are holistic to the entire environment. They can standardize your SharePoint look, feel, operation, and purpose. Consider Microsoft’s PowerPoint application. Once installed, you can use PowerPoint, but you’ve got nothing in there but a plain, white master slide. Even more critically, your presentations lack direction. Now apply master slides, and you get a standard look, feel, and purpose for your presentation. SharePoint is much the same. Upon installation, you’ve got a few standard out-of-the box definitions (team sites, blank sites, meeting workspaces, and so on) that are packed with all the collaborative capabilities you need at your fingertips, but they are not tailored for your business. By customizing existing site definitions or creating and adding new ones, you can create the master templates you’ll need to make SharePoint work for your company.

How Do These Site Definitions Work?

In a nutshell, when you create a new site, SharePoint will reference a master list of site definition configuration files. From there, it looks for the selected WEBTEMP.xml file and the respective folder containing the actual site definition.

This will give you a new site that appears to have its own unique pages. However, the pages are actually shared across all sites that use that definition. When you customize site definitions for your company, you are actually duplicating the WEBTEMP.xml file, renaming it, assigning it a new ID, and creating its matching site definition directory in the proper location along with all the changes you want for that specific definition. This allows it to be referenced during the site provisioning process. As a result, you are using this referencing process to optimize SharePoint’s performance by minimizing duplicate files, which are often referenced as “unghosted” sites.

Site definitions are stored in the following location:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\webserver extensions\60\Template\SiteTemplates

The WEBTEMP file is stored in the following location:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\Template\1033\XML

Here’s the winning difference between site definitions and site templates. Along with performance optimization, SharePoint site definitions are a very powerful way of ensuring that updates and changes reach all your sites. For example, if you create 100-plus sites using the same site definition, you can then push out any changes, such as a new logo, new content type, and so on, to all sites by updating a single .aspx file. The opposite would be true for site templates where each site created with the site template would have to be updated individually.

Numerous components of a site definition are available for customization. Some of these include the following:

• Branding: The general look and feel of the site, including logos, color schema’s graphics, and more.
• Site provisioning: The available site definitions that can be referenced as subsites. This proves useful for industries wanting to centrally locate certain sites with specific purposes.
• Permission levels: Many companies find the permission levels inside a standard site unnecessary and not applicable to their governance or business needs. Custom site definitions can remove unnecessary permission levels and add new ones.
• Site columns: Some industries are subject to mandatory compliance standards, such as the Privacy Act, security classifications, and more. Many of the out-of- box site columns cannot be used in these industries. Site definition enables you to remove unwanted site columns and add custom ones that are better suited for your business’ needs.
• Content types: Standardize your content types and tailor them for your environment.
• SharePoint groups: Provides a blueprint for which groups are created and what permission levels are automatically applied to those groups.

There are a lot of standard approaches to customizing site definitions. When considering what should go into a new site definition, it is best to first evaluate what comes standard with the out-of-box site definitions. Then, you can remove any unwanted materials and add where needed.