Designing application to serve multiple clients

Question

I've been tasked with developing a small SharePoint 2010 application that serves multiple clients. I'm required to have one site that serves everyone but dynamically displays different data (header, footer, menu body content) depending on which client the logged in user is from.

My plan is to have a generic splash page and once they've logged in I will grab their client_id. With that I will use a code behind master page to customize the header/footer/menu for them and use WebParts to display their custom content. I plan to store all the content for each client in a list. When they login, I will match their client_id to a column in the list and the rest of the columns will provide the content. As new clients are added I can just create a new list item with their unique client_id.

Is this the best way to handle my scenario in SharePoint? Thanks for your time and expertise!

Answer 1

Usually it'll be better to redirect them to different subsites (probably site collections), based on the client id.

Than all content can be security protected without causing any performance problems. The main downsides of doing all of the trimming in code are:

• Lots of custom code => lots of possible mistakes
• No search as that might show invalid results
• Danger of users knowing SharePoint Urls might access wrong information