I am creating a new SharePoint 2013 farm and am rethinking the way the SharePoint farm should be architected. There are considerable roadblocks to sharing information between business silos. That has been the way business has been done for years, however, should tackling these roadblocks be done by processes and workflows or by the architecture of the farm? I am not sure which way to construct the site collections/sites in the farm because I want to maximize the efficiency and break-down the walls around the existing business units.
1. Should I build our new SharePoint farm with site collections matching the existing divisional business units? This would be easy. If so, then would breaking-down the walls limiting communication be done via permissions, groups and business workflows?
2. Or should I construct the new SharePoint farm organizing the site collections/sites into functional business units to begin with and not aligning them directly with the existing vertical silos? There are similar business functions in multiple business silos. Then all of the sub-sites would share a common interest and can share data. There may be portions of a vertical business unit broken up into different site collections. Is that a problem? Couldn’t the sharing of data be easily done across site collections? Would this organization cause too much confusion?
Thanks,
Alex
The concept is to organize sites by job function under a common site collection. There are several different sub-departments that perform similar job functions but in different areas. If we organize the site of users based on function then all “purchasing” roles will be under a single roof. The thought is to organize SharePoint for a universal scalability. This would allow for scalability and growth without re-structuring (maybe) the site/sub-site layouts. The navigation to the sites would need to be managed programmatically so that all the links resolve to the correct location. That is our thought process.
We are not sold on this idea yet so if there are objections or roadblocks we would encounter, please let us know.
