Is this a right way to design a site collection vs subsite structure

Question

I have been managing a sharepoint site collection that has the following figures:-

1. Size - 5 GB
2. Groups - almost 300 (no direct permission at site or item level)
3. Lists - 70 (mostly info path apps)

Now the problem is whenever a new list is required, giving permissions become a challenge. There are no permissions to be inherited and no item level permissions to be given, creating new groups becomes the way to go.

However, when I stop inheriting permissions and remove the existing groups , I get the following error. SharePoint basically complains and says that delete a few groups at a time.

Therefore I decided to go for a new site collection in the same web application to cater the new infopath requirements from here on. Much to my better judgement , creating a site collection is asking a lot considering SharePoint a site collection can have thousands of subsites and all can reside inside a content database safely till the safe size limit 200 GB is reached.

Just because for the sake of so many groups, I went for a new site collection which tells me that its not the best way perhaps to do it. I'm sure there must be some other alternate ways to tackle this scenario and come up with a more optimized solution. I need some inputs on my approach.

Answer 1

You may fare better using SharePoint Audiences. SharePoint has limitations in the number of users/groups it can handle per object. There is a good post about those limitations here: http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/archive/2008/09/11/sharepoint-security-hard-limits-and-recommended-practices.aspx

Using Audiences, you can have the UPA compile the various Audiences and then when you use those for permissions, you will be less likely to hit the ACL limits.