SharePoint 2013 First Impressions: Creating a new Site Collection

In the new SharePoint 2013 preview environment (sign up for an Office 365 Developer Site and you can create your own environment) you get a very nice “Central Admin” type tool for managing all your site collections.  By default, you get the following site collections:

• A public facing web site
• A private intranet site
• A private search site
• A private my site

In the preview site, you restricted to a single public facing web site, but you can create more site collections.  One good example would be to create a publishing site collection from scratch – just create one as a private collection and you can have a ready deployable WCM style publishing site.
One big warning though – creating a new site collection takes a very long time!  On my instance, it took over an hour to create a site collection!