SharePoint File Structure - Doc Library

Question

We are trying to migrate our company to SharePoint, however its becoming very challenging. I will try and explain this as best as I can but our company is a sales driven company. We are made up of 7 different divisions. Each division wants (needs) there own site with a document library. Inside of each of these sites would be a client folder and inside that would be all of the customers they sell to along with pricing lists and other info.

Not everyone needed access to ever client and not everyone needs access to every customer and some people only need access just to the customer folders. However doing custom permissions with folders inside of folders seems rather cumbersome and if someone doesn't have access to the parent folder they wont see the folder unless they have a link to it. Can any one offer any suggestions? The main goal here is not not hire a consultant and not create any crazy out of the box situation but we want users to be able to see there stuff but not see everything. Just not sure how to achieve this.

Folder Structure

Region --Client ---Customer

Answer 1

I would design this differently. Here are two ideas.

Create a hub site collection for Sales, Create site collections for each region and connect then to the hub site. Then I would create a doc library for each Client, then a folder for each Customer.

Another way to do this would be to create all the region site collections as hub sites, then create site collections for each client and connect to the hub, then create doc libraries for each customer.

I like the second method better if you don't need a central hub site for sales. With the second method if you permission a user at the library level they will have only have limited access permissions to the parent.

Another note, because you want to do custom permissions make sure you create the site collections as non-group joined, group connected sites are more difficult to set specific permissions on.

Answer 2

If you want to have different permissions in the site or library, you can set different permission levels.

You could refer to this article about Permission Levels.