Site Provisioning in Hosted Environments

Question

I am looking for a solution that would allow me to provision sites, in environments where I don't have server access (hosting, Office 365).

My issue: I need to provide site collections or sites to my users. They all have similar needs for the site structure, but each team has its own naming conventions depending on which partners they work with. So for example the organizational structure will be called "Units" by some users, while others will call it "Divisions" or "Departments". For this reason a site template doesn't work well for me, and I assume sandboxed solutions won't work either.

I am thinking that maybe Web Services or Powershell could help, but I am not sure where to start and looking for advice.

Answer 1

I think that sandboxed solutions will work, but that's not my thing. Otherwise, how could people deploy a large number of sites? I understand one can interact with an Office365 site using Powershell remotely as well.

However, I've often thought about the possibility of using SPServices to deploy a large number of objects. One could certainly build out the XML representations, store them somewhere accessible by script (probably a Custom List) and then spin through and create the desired objects. I've never pursues it because it's the exact thing that people use Powershell or managed code to do.