SharePoint - Site Content and Structure

Site Content and Structure page is used to manage both the content and structure of your SharePoint site collection. In SharePoint, navigation is dynamically generated from the site collection hierarchy. This means that when you change the structure of the site (for example, if you move a subsite), that change is carried through to the site navigation. Where the item now appears in the site navigation reflects the new location of the underlying subsite.

The actions you can take on this page include more than changing the structure of the site. You can manage content by performing other actions on lists and list items. For example, you check out or check in, publish, and copy items.

To ensure that the interface for the Site Content and Structure page is familiar to you, it was designed to be similar to Windows Explorer. You can see the site collection hierarchy in the navigation pane as a tree view on the left of the Site Content and Structure page. On the right, items are listed in the list pane. To access the Site Content and Structure page, you must have a minimum of Contribute permissions.

You can go to the Site Content and Structure page through the Site Actions menu. If you are at the top level of your site, you will see the menu item listed on the Site Actions menu. If you are in a subsite, you can navigate to the Site Settings page and then navigate to the Site Content and Structure page.

You can use features such as check-out, discard check-outs, submit for approval, or publish items. In addition, you can restructure the site collection by moving, copying, or deleting content items. When content is copied, moved, or deleted, the links associated with that content are also updated.

The actions that are enabled for an item in the Site Content and Structure page are context sensitive and depend on the status of the item. For example, if an item is checked out, the check-out action is not enabled. The actions that are enabled depend on the security context of the current user. Beyond whether an action is enabled for a feature, actions that are enabled or even displayed depend on other factors such as the type of list an item is contained in or if certain features, such as publishing, are enabled in the site collection.

The discard check-outs action, which enables you to undo the check-out action for a different user on either a single item or multiple items, restores items to the state that they were in when they were last checked out. A typical scenario is if an employee forgets to check in files before going on vacation. The manager can use the discard check-outs action to release the files. This action is only available from the Manage Content and Structure page and only if you have the appropriate permissions.

On the Site Content and Structure page, any action that you can perform on a single item you can perform on multiple items by first selecting the items and then selecting an action.

You can copy entire subsites or lists to another subsite in the site collection hierarchy or you can copy individual content items to any compatible library. However, it is not possible to use the copy action to duplicate a library item in the same library.

After you perform the copy action, the site navigation is updated for all navigation components, and the site navigation will reflect that the subsites, libraries or library items are in both locations.

You can move individual library items or entire subsites to another subsite within the site collection. A subsite can be moved to be directly under the top level in the site collection hierarchy or under another subsite in the site collection hierarchy. When you move a subsite, all of the content in the subsite is moved. However, you cannot move only a library (for example, only the socuments library) to another subsite.

When you move a subsite or an item, because the navigation is generated dynamically from the site collection hierarchy, the navigation components are automatically updated so that the new location for the item or subsite is reflected in the navigation.

You can use the move action to efficiently re-architect your site. For example, you might need to rebuild the navigation for your site or move the subsite for a department because they have been reorganized to be under a different group.

This feature enables a site administrator to reorganize a site without forcing site administrators to delete each item individually. Entire subsites or individual items can be deleted from the site collection hierarchy.

If the recycle bin is enabled for the site, list items can be recovered after they have been deleted. However, deleting a subsite is a drastic action: the entire branch is permanently deleted even if the recycle bin is enabled.

You can use the feature "Show and Hide Related Resources" to determine the resources that are called by an item. Resources are any elements used by the page, including page layout, images, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), links from the page to other pages, links to the page from within the site collection, and links to or from this page. Identifying the related resources for an item is especially useful if, for example, you need to delete an image. By determining the dependencies for that image, you can update the links or resources as necessary.

This feature only shows the related resources for one item at a time. If you do not have an item selected when you click Show Related Resources, the first item in the list pane is selected. Whenever you select a different item in the list, resources are displayed for that item.If your objective is to not display a subsite or page in the site navigation, you should not delete the site; instead you must go to the Navigation Options page and use the Hide function.

There are reports in the Site Content and Structure page. Seven reports are available. When you select a report, all the items that match the filter in the current site and any subsites under the current site are returned. To determine the container for the item in a report, you can point to the name column, and the path is displayed in the browser status bar.

If you have the appropriate permissions on your site, you can create or edit reports to make them specific to your situation or environment. For example, authors might have difficulty locating all of the pages that they are working on throughout the site collection. By running a report, they can find all the items and then, from the report view, they can perform actions on the items in the same way they can in the All Documents view.

Because reports are items in a list, after you create a new report, it is automatically deployed. Also, because reports are list items, they can be version-controlled so that they must be checked before they can be edited.