How do I know if I have a root site collection?

Question

I'm trying to publish announcements across site collections and I'm following instructions I have found on this site. One of the steps says to create an announcement list in the root site collection. Where would I find this root site collection (if it even exists)? I'm a SharePoint novice. Explain this to me like I'm a kindergartener.

Answer 1

Root site collection can mean one of two things depending on the context of the article you are referring to. It could mean the root of the environment, like http://sharepoint.domain.com or it could be referring to the root of your site, like http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/hr.

Answer 2

I believe you understand SharePoint,just confused. Well when a site is created with explicit managed path ("/" usually, may be "sites" or any other),it becomes the first ever site ,"top level site " we can say.This is called root site collection.

So commonly the root site is "http://sharepoint.corp.com/"

But it can be "http://sharepoint.corp.com/sites/site1"

Answer 3

You could simply check if the serverrelative URL is "/". You can do this using the property of the RootWeb of your Site-Object in the Server object model or using the Information from the "_spPageContextInfo"-object in Javascript on Client side