#firstpost #SPOnewbie
Hello
I am learning SP, almost from scratch, at an alarming rate, but there is one area of Information architecture which I cannot get my head around, and I’m hoping to fine some guidance from some lovely people…
I work for a group of secondary schools in the UK – each have their own way of doing things, but they also each have shared documents on a file server which I want them to move to SharePoint.
I want each school to have their own space to properly upload and organise their teaching resources in such a way that:
- The school who ‘owns’ the resource are the only school who can edit in situ
- Other schools can easily search for and view resources which other schools have created.
From here, I am unsure how to best create the layout. From what I can tell, my options are as follows:
- Each school has its own site collection, and each department within the school has its own site
- There is one overall site collection, each school has its own subsite, and each of those are split into departmental subsites
- Same as 2, but each department has their own document library, not a subsite
- Same as 2, but departments are split into folders
There may be an entirely different taxonomy approach which I have yet to consider, but my brain is pickled – if anyone can throw any wisdom my way, I would be very grateful.
Thank you for reading this far. I hope someone is able to help me make more sense of this.
Thank you so much @beau-cameron and @collab365com.
Mark, do you agree that the best approach is option 1 – a site collection for each school, and sub-sites for each department?
Yep – I actually worked on a similar setup 4-5 years ago (SP 2007) and they went for 1 web app per school. However, Host-Named Site Collections got introduced since and there’s no need for that topology now. The way I always think of it is to try to see into the future and ask yourself “what if’s”. e.g. – What if 1 school wants to move to a different provider / tech? – What if 2 schools need to merge? You need to build out an infrastructure that’s future-proof, scalable and supports the security you need. BTW, A lot of this may still be valid for you – it’s old now, but the concepts still pretty much stand up : https://slk.codeplex.com/ and https://lg.codeplex.com/ (This is what I implemented at a local council here in the UK). BTWx2 – I will ask Alex Pearce who is an expert in SP and EDU to take a look at this and see if he can shed some light for you.