Sharepoint: Organizing an Intranet site hierarchy

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Not totally sure this should be here or in Stackoverflow, but I look at it not from a developers point of view but from an admins.

In the past we had a pretty anemic intranet – now with SharePoint 2013 this will get a lot more use. We mostly delayed investing for the last half year 😉

My problem is – how do I organize the sites so that they go best with SharePoint long term, from an admin point of view, while possibly sites get added or removed.

In the past we had ONE site collection (Intranet) with sub-sites in it (not in the /sites folder) for all major parts of the small company (finance, organization, it services etc.). I am not sure this is "good enough" flexibility wise for a multi year thing. I also am a little concerned with everything being in one site collection…

I am just setting up the new intranet (having moved the old one to a new app intraned-old). So, here we go with some questions.

  • What is the best template to use for the root? TeamSite? I do not lneed at the oment things like publishing – the homepages / root portal will be mostly static, lists.
  • How would you structure sub-sites? It seems I can not make separate site collections outside the /sites folder. So, the alternative is to make this (use /sites), go to sepaarate applications (finance.intranet/) or go on making subsites in the root site, same site collection.

I definitely want t ogo into search, as we plan to move more and more documents etc. into sharepoint – we are small (7 people) but da full separation of the departments is needed, with for example developers not able to see our financial records. We also need – in 2-3 departments – to set up BI integration, make sub-portals for the people to see data from databases (some sort of "get an overview how we are standing).

A little lost how to set that up so that the setup does not come back to bite me some months down the road.

Best Answer

Ok, I am giving one answer so far - let's see if someone else finds something better.

  • I am going with Team Templates everywhere for the start. As indicated there is no Need for serious Publishing. Due to the nature of the Setup (further down) the home area can be replaced easily (it contains Little more than a Portal page).
  • It seems tha using "child sites" is not good. Creating new Site COllections is tricky, too, because the only place to put them is the /sites Folder in root, which limits, UNLESS... one reads the Manual where it is clear one can add more managed paths. I have created one managed path for every department (/finance) then can set up a separate site collection there.
  • Thanks to 2013 there is a way to Combine all the Navigation - which is nice.

That seems to be it for the Moment - the good Thing with site colelctions like that is that theoretically they cna bem oved to different Content databases should they outgrow the one Content database we have now. THat is relevant as it is otherwise an administrative nightmare. Site COllections also have totally self-sufficient Setup in security and Features, which means that Projects to update a particular site can go relatively isolated. Again, this is an adminsitrative consideration - not a specific programmer wise, but it is nice to know I can have finance or another area separately developped without too many cross references. Always good to think of isolating Areas like that so development Projects dont go overboard in scope.

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