Site Factory includes site collections and groups that you can use to organize your websites. As you create more and more of all of these objects, it can become difficult to keep track of them. For example, you may be scanning the Site Factory Management Console when you see testwebsite. It may be unclear whether that is a website or a site collection. It is also unclear what the word test refers to.

You can potentially avoid confusion and improve a development team (glossary term, activate to view definition)’s ability to collaborate by using standardized conventions to organize your websites, site collections, and groups.

Site Factory includes site collections and groups that you can use to organize your websites. As you create more and more of all of these objects, it can become difficult to keep track of them. For example, you may be scanning the Site Factory Management Console when you see testwebsite. It may be unclear whether that is a website or a site collection. It is also unclear what the word test refers to.

You can potentially avoid confusion and improve a development team (glossary term, activate to view definition)’s ability to collaborate by using standardized conventions to organize your websites, site collections, and groups.

Use the following recommendations as you name objects in the Site Factory Management Console:

• Websites

  • Include the website’s site name in the website object’s name.

  • Use only letters and numbers in your website object name.

  • If you are working with multiple copies of a website for development, add the creation date to the end of the website name (for example, mywebsite20161010 for a website created on October 10, 2016).

• Site collections

  • Include the primary website’s site name in the site collection’s object name.

  • Use only letters and numbers in your site collection object name.

  • Add collection to the end of the site collection name (for example, mywebsitecollection).

• Groups

  • Create groups that separate websites and site collections in a way that mirrors your organization’s structure. Examples include organizational units (such as Finance, Marketing, or Support) and geographic regions (including North America, Europe, or Asia/Pacific).

  • Use descriptive terms that help users easily identify group contents, moving from a general term for top-level groups to a more specific term as you create subgroups.

    For example:

    • North America

      • United States

        • Massachusetts