Tenant Administration Sites

SharePoint 2010 has had some major feature investments around the concept of “multi-tenancy”.  What does this mean?  In short – it provides the ability to keep data from one customer (or group) separate from one another.  Part of the features for managing this is a new site type called a “Tenant Administration Site”. 

The Tenant Administration (or TA) Site gives the tenant administrator the ability to create new site collections and manage all features that have been assigned to that site subscription. 

A Site Subscription is comprised of a unique ID that is used to associate the TA Site, Site Collections, Feature Sets, and Service Applications.  There is a lot there that we will dig into in future posts.  But for now I want to give you a quick tour of the TA Site (site collection – to be specific).

First of all – how do you get one?  This can only be done via PowerShell because of a few of the switches you have to throw at creation time.  Here is the basic syntax:

new-spsite -url http://intranet/sites/CloudAdmin -AdministrationSiteType tenantAdministration -template “tenantadmin#0″ -owneralias {domain user}
-SiteSubscription {SiteSubsciptionID}

There are 3 Key switches you need to pay attention to:

-AdministrationSiteType : When you set this at site collection creation time it sets a flag that this site collection is used to managed tenant site collections.  The site will still create if you don’t set the switch – but many of the features inside of the site collection will not work. 

-Template “tenantadmin#0” : This is a new site template in SharePoint 2010 that provides the appropriate abilities to manage tenant site collections.

-SiteSubscription : This is how you associate the tenant administration site with a SiteSubscription.  Note: This is a one-to-many relationship.  A site collection can only be associated with one Tenant Administration Site while a Tenant Administration Site can be associated with may site collections.

Lets take a look at the site:

The beauty of this site is it delegates many of the activities that the IT Pro had to do for all customers like:

• Creating new Site Collections
• Managing InfoPath Forms Services
• Configuring Send-To Connections
• Managing Profile Services

And many more.  So as you can see – this new feature creates a new level of administration for you to plan for in your Governance plan for your company.  Many people have been slow to come to the table on this “tenant” concept because they think it’s just for Hosting companies.  The reality is I believe it is equally as important in the enterprise for managing site collections and ultimately, keeping sensitive internal content out of the hands of those who shouldn’t see it (HR, General Council…)

Here you can see items that you can manage for Site Collections:

This is a lot of power to delegate out to your user base – so you’ll definitely want to plan for that education and oversight. One thing I want to point out here – notice that you can create new Site Collections from the Tenant Administration site – this will fail if you don’t have Self-Service Site Creation enabled.  To enable this, go to Central Admin > Application Management > Configure self-service site creation.

Much more to come on tenant administration!