When planning for your site collection architecture, you'll need to make some decisions about the design. These decisions include the following:

• The organization method for site collections or hub sites: Common organizational grouping methods include business regions or locations, product or business groups, agencies or departments, and external collaboration partners.
• Site templates: Once you know how many site collections you need, you can determine what kinds of site templates to use. For classic SharePoint architecture, this could include templates from the Collaboration, Enterprise, or Publishing site groups. For modern SharePoint architecture, the two most common templates are Communications Site and Team Site.
• Storage: When you purchase a SharePoint Online subscription (either standalone or as part of an Office 365 suite), your tenant is automatically allocated a pool of storage based on the number and type of user licenses purchased. Storage is automatically allocated by default, but you can further adjust or limit the storage as your organization requires.
• Language support: If your organization needs to support multiple languages, you may wish to use the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) feature to allow users to view sites and pages in a language other than the one configured for the site or site collection.

• Governance: Perhaps the most often-overlooked planning task, governance is the process of deciding things such as permission models, managing external user access, rights management, common user interface and design elements, the amount of customization you allow administrators to perform, how search works, retention, and site life cycle management.

As part of your management tasks, you may be asked to create, delete, or restore site collections. Most of these tasks are very straightforward—the exception being fully deleting a SharePoint Modern site.

Creating a site collection (classic architecture) or modern site (modern architecture) is a relatively simple task and is performed using the SharePoint admin center. These tasks require you to be either a SharePoint Admin or Global Admin.

If you need to create a site collection that uses a classic template, you can navigate to the classic SharePoint Admin Center page by manually typing in the URL and selecting the Classic site collections page link under the Classic features section of the new SharePoint Admin Center or by using the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. In this example, you'll follow the Classic site collections page path. The steps are identical once you get to the classic site collections page:

1. Navigate to the SharePoint Admin Center (https://tenant-admin.sharepoint.com).
2. In the navigation pane, select Classic features:

3. On the Classic features page, expand More classic features:

4. Select Classic site collections page. This will open a new tab in the browser:

5. Click New | Private Site Collection:

6. Fill out the New site collection page details by entering values in the Title, Web Site Address, and Administrator fields. Select a template in the Template Selection area, and select a time zone for the site collection in the Time Zone area. Click OK when finished:

Once the site creation process has finished, you can navigate to the site and begin to customize it.

Creating a modern site (referred to as a site collection in classic architecture) is quite simple from the SharePoint Admin Center. Use the following steps to complete the task:

1. Navigate to the SharePoint Admin Center (https://tenant-admin.sharepoint.com).
2. In the navigation pane, select Active sites. On the Active sites page, select + Create.
3. Select the type of modern site you'd like to create (either Team site or Communication site). If you select Other options, you'll create a site without an Office 365 group.
4. Fill out the details by entering values in the Site name, Group email address, and Group owner fields. Select a language in the Select a language drop-down menu. If necessary, expand Advanced settings to modify privacy settings and the time zone and to enter a description. Click Next when finished:

5. Specify additional owners or members and click Finish.

Once you've created a modern site, you can either register it as a hub or associate it with an existing hub, if desired.

If you need to create a lot of sites (for example, setting up infrastructure for a new company or division or creating similar structures in multiple tenants), you may want to do these tasks via PowerShell:

1. Download and install the latest version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell from https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=255251.

2. Launch PowerShell and import the SharePoint Online module:

Import-Module SharePointOnline

3. Once it has been imported, you'll need to connect to SharePoint Online (if you are using multi-factor authentication for your account, you will need to omit the -Credential parameter):

Connect-SPOService -Credential (Get-Credential) -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com

4. Retrieve the list of available templates for creating your sites:

Get-SPOWebTemplate

5. View the templates listed. Select the value in the Name column that matches the type of site you wish to create. The list of templates available to you is limited by your license subscription:

6. Create the site substituting the value in the Name column for the type of site you want to create:

New-SPOSite -Url https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<sitename> -Owner [email protected] -StorageQuota 100 -NoWait -ResourceQuota 50 -Template <TemplateName>

Deleting a site collection is a fairly straightforward process for classic SharePoint; however, modern SharePoint sites that are connected to Office 365 groups require a few extra steps to be permanently deleted:

1. Navigate to the SharePoint Admin Center (https://admin.microsoft.com), expand Admin centers, and select SharePoint.
2. In the left navigation pane of the SharePoint admin center, select Active sites.
3. Select a site to delete by clicking on it. If it is a site that has not been connected to an Office 365 group, you'll get a simple dialog to delete the site, as shown in the following screenshot:

If you selected a site that has been connected to an Office 365 group, however, you'll get an alternate dialog box that will present an option to also delete the associated Office 365 group. You will have to acknowledge deleting the group before being allowed to proceed with deleting the site, as the following screenshot depicts:

Once you've deleted a site, it goes into a state where it's not immediately accessible but can be recovered. For classic sites or sites not connected to an Office 365 group, the site is preserved for 93 days before permanent deletion. If it is an Office 365-connected site, the Office 365 group is only preserved for 30 days (as part of the Azure AD recycle bin).

In either case, you may wish to remove the site earlier than the purge period. If the site you wish to remove is a classic site or was not connected to an Office 365 group, you can click on the Deleted sites menu option in the navigation pane. Notice that the Permanently delete button is grayed-out for modern sites connected to groups, as depicted in the following screenshot:

However, if you select a classic site or a site that was not connected to an Office 365 group, you're able to select the Permanently delete button, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can click Permanently delete to immediately remove the site and its contents if the option is available. However, for modern sites, you'll have to go through an extra step.

To permanently delete a modern group, you'll need to access SharePoint online from PowerShell:

1. Download and install the latest version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell from https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=255251.
2. Launch PowerShell and import the SharePoint Online module:

Import-Module SharePointOnline

3. Once it has been imported, you'll need to connect to SharePoint Online:

Connect-SPOService -Credential (Get-Credential) -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com

4. Retrieve the list of deleted sites, and select the site to permanently delete:

Get-SPODeletedSite

5. From the list of deleted sites, select the value under the URL that represents the site you wish to permanently delete:

6. Use that value to specify which site to remove:

Remove-SPODeletedSite -Identity https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<sitename>

Restoring a site collection is a straightforward process. For classic sites, you'll have up to 93 days to restore the site collection. For modern sites, you'll be limited to 30 days, based on the availability of the connected Office 365 group. To restore a deleted site, follow these steps (either as a SharePoint Admin or Global Admin):

1. Navigate to the SharePoint Admin Center (https://admin.microsoft.com), expand Admin centers, and select SharePoint.
2. In the navigation pane of the SharePoint admin center, under Sites, select Deleted sites.
3. Select the site to restore, and then click the Restore button at the top of that page:

In many organizations, it may be preferable to delegate administrative control of sites to those responsible for maintaining the content. To do this, you can assign the users as owners (modern SharePoint terminology) or site collection administrators (classic SharePoint terminology).

Site collection administrators can be added via the SharePoint admin center user interface. To do so, use the following procedure:

1. Navigate to the SharePoint Admin Center (https://admin.microsoft.com), expand Admin centers, and select SharePoint.
2. In the left navigation pane of the SharePoint admin center, select Active sites.
3. Select a site, and then select the Owners drop-down menu from the menu bar. For classic sites, you'll be given the following options: Change primary admin and Change admins. For modern sites, you'll see the Change group owners option, as shown in the following screenshot:

4. Modify the admin membership. If you are modifying a classic site and select a new primary admin, the current primary admin will continue to be listed as an additional admin. When finished modifying the membership, click Save at the bottom of the flyout:

You can also modify the membership of a site collection or site using PowerShell.

To add an administrator to a classic site, follow these steps.

1. Download and install the latest version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell from https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=255251.
2. Launch PowerShell and import the SharePoint Online module:

Import-Module SharePointOnline

3. Once it has been imported, you'll need to connect to SharePoint Online:

Connect-SPOService -Credential (Get-Credential) -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com

4. Set the user as a Site Collection Administrator:

Set-SPOUser -Site https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<site> -LoginName <[email protected]> -IsSiteCollectionAdmin $true

5. If you want to promote the user to the primary Site Collection Administrator, perform the following step:

Set-SPOSite -Identity https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<site> -Owner <[email protected]>

Since modern sites are connected to Office 365 groups, modern site group membership is managed through the Add-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlet and takes a bit more effort. If you need to do it (for example, performing the activity in bulk), you may want to administer it via PowerShell with this process:

1. Connect to Exchange Online PowerShell:

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential (Get-Credential) -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection;
Import-PSSession $Session

2. Find the appropriate Office 365 group using the SharePoint site URL as a filter:

$Group = Get-UnifiedGroup -ResultSize Unlimited | ? { $_.SharePointSiteUrl -eq "https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<site>"}

3. Add the new owner to the Unified Group Links Members attribute:

Add-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity $Group.DistinguishedName -LinkType Members -Links <[email protected]>

4. Add the new owner to the Unified Group Links Owners attribute:

Add-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity $Group.DistinguishedName -LinkType Owners -Links <[email protected]>