My company currently uses SharePoint 2007. Our farm has one web front end and our intranet is a single site collection with 25 team sites and a few subsites. We have approxmiately 150 users and steadily increasing. We are planning to upgade to 2013, have decided not to migrate but instead build from the ground up.
Based on our data, documents, lists, etc., we have discussed having multiple site collections with associated team sites instead of one big site collection and we are looking for suggestions as to which way would be the right way for our farm.
What we are sure of is that we do not want to just migrate as is and run 2013 the same way as we run 2007. I know we can leverage the new features and want to make sure our new site(s) are properly structured.
Thanks in advance for your input!
I totally agree with Vlad. I would separate them out into separate site collections based on the reasons listed. The one drawback like he said is that you don’t get the consistent navigation out of the box. For 2007 & 2010 you had to write your own site map provider or some other custom solution, however it sounds like for 2013 there are other options that are closer to out of box.
Hey,
There are people here who do that exact kind of advising and can probably give you some better guidelines.. but here are mine.
IT:
Size: If you only got 1 Site Collections = you only have 1 Content DB. Make sure it doesn’t go over the recommended limit of 200GB. If you do different Site Collections, you can move them later!
Backups: Are they equally important? Maybe some of them you might want to backup every 10 min because the data there is worth millions. It’s better to put it in a separate Content DB and SQL Backupit… but you can only do it if it’s a Site Collection 🙂
“Business”
Permissions: How are permissions on the Sites? A rule of thumb is .. if same permissions = subsite, different permissions = different site collection.
Do you need “Consistent Navigation” across all the team sites? With publishing enabled on the team site, you could have the same navigation in subsites that are under. However, you can achieve very similar results and maybe even better with some Search or Content Query Webparts (I know it’s doable, but I am not the person you should ask how exactly :P).
Looking forward to what other people say!
