For a large retail corporation that manages 800+ vendors, creating each site is a tedious and time consuming endeavor. Each site will need to be customized with branding, lists, libraries, views, home page layouts, security groups, and other features that cannot be configured with a site template.

Objective

Automatically create sites based on details provided from a master list.

Overview

Before creating a new site, a master list is populated with the necessary information: title and URL. The site creation application is kicked off manually by an administrator. Once the application is running, the site details are pulled from the list item and applied to a site template. Security groups will also be created and proper permissions applied to the site and other sites that the groups may have access to.

Solution

The site creation tool is a timer-based application that runs off an on-premise server. The timer job can be set to any predetermined interval to check for any list items that have a SiteCreated value of "No".
A sample list item:

​Properties view of a test item in the master list

The red boxes indicate the minimum details that pertain specifically to the site creation tool. The SiteCreated value indicates if the site has been created. Setting this value to "No" will create the site again.
The two contact fields are used to populate a customized web part on the home page that shows pertinent contact information. Certain features are also enabled during this process; in this case, SharePoint Server Publishing is activated to apply custom branding.
Additionally, security groups are also created based on the site title and granted the appropriate permission levels. In this particular case, these groups are also given limited permissions (customized Read permissions) to the parent site, which is delegated by the site creation application. Also, groups from the parent site are also given varying permission levels to the vendor site.