SharePoint Content Glossary

Managing content in SharePoint requires understanding some SharePoint-specific concepts.

Site collections and sites. A SharePoint installation hosts one or more site collections. A site collection is a top-level site (for example, intranet.example.com) and subsites (for example, intranet.example.com/finance). All content for a site collection resides in tables in a single SQL Server content database. Site collection administrators control the content management policies (such as retention policies for content) for the entire site collection, but they can delegate some rights (such as the right to create subsites and approve content) to administrators of individual sites in the collection.

Lists and document libraries. Most SharePoint content in a site is stored in tables called lists, each row of which is called an item. For example, a SharePoint calendar is a list of event items. Conceptually, SharePoint lists correspond to tables in a relational database and items correspond to database records, although that is not how lists are stored in SQL Server. SharePoint typically keeps documents in a special type of list called a document library, each item of which corresponds to a document. SharePoint stores documents in SQL Server by default, although third parties can extend SharePoint to work with stored documents elsewhere, such as in a file system.