I am getting ready to create a SP environment. I will have a bunch of Team Sites, a bunch of Project Sites, a bunch of Client Sites, and a pretty large Intranet (I have decided to use a separate authoring and separate publishing site combo for the Intranet).
What is the best practice for Team/Publishing (Collaboration) Sites – should they be created in a separate Site Collection for EACH of these three categories (e.g., three site collections – Team/Project/Client). Or perhaps one collaboration site collection to house all three? Or can the authoring site house everything – including the collaboration sites? It’s important to note that the collaboration sites will share lists/libraries amongst each of the team/client/publishing sites.
I’m trying to get my head around a proper structure before I get too far down this path. Any advice would be very much welcomed. I’ve done quite a bit of research, but I was hoping to get some advice from someone who has gone down this road.
Thank you.
In a past project, we created a policy to build separate site collections for each department (IT, Sales, Supply Chain, etc.). We also had a ‘team site’ collection which mostly housed cross functional and project sites. Originally, there was only one collection and one content database which was experiencing performance and organizational issues. Another concern was efficiency of backup/restore and disaster recovery. This is quite a few years ago but I think the original content size at the time was approaching 100 GB. Not really a lot by today’s standards! 😀 If I recall correctly, the last metric I saw after a few years of this approach had a combined content database size that was approaching 1 TB but was spread out over ~10 site collections. There is more to the story but that’s it in a nutshell.
In your case I would start by asking myself:
- How large will the content be in a year? 5 years? 10 years?
- How will you manage site sprawl?
- What is my backup/restore plan?
- How quickly can we be online in the event of a disaster?
There should be some formulas out there to help answer growth expectations as well as site planning. If it’s significant, go with multiple site collections. There should be some engineered numbers defining ‘significant’.
Your note regarding cross-collaboration might throw a wrench. But I generally would not be very concerned about it as long as the information workers understand clearly how to access specific bits.
