We have some 30+ departmental sites that need to be created for our intranet on SharePoint 2010 and are looking for ways to accelerate this process. One method suggested has been to use a standardized site definition that can be used as a template for all the sites. Are site definitions the same thing as site templates? A few other questions:
- Should the site definition be based on the superset of all lists/libraries that the sites will use?
- Should the definition include any pages? All sites will have at least a home page but beyond that we don't know the exact needs of each department. And the content of the home page will differ. The pages will all be publishing pages.
- For our scenario, what's the best way to create the site definition? We'd like to use the same standard look-and-feel across all sites.
- Are there automated tools to create the site definition? Is Visual Studio the tool to use here?
Your guidance is much appreciated. Thank you.