One Library or Many? Listing Libraries

Question

Googling/searching for this has been rather difficult because a 'list' is a special thing in sharepoint.

We have a number of sales centers around the country that periodically need to transfer photographs to our corporate HQ. We have been using a large number of drop box accounts and a complex arrangement of shared folders to accomplish this.

As we recently migrated to office 365 mostly for the email and IM capability I have been trying to find a way to apply sharepoint to this issue.

My first attempt was to create a document library and then a folder in the library for each sales center and then share each folder with that sale's center's manager. However this created some issues. Because the manager does not have view permissions in the parent folder, their skydrive app did not want to synch their folder.

It also looks like I may run into issues related to character limits for the URL that links to the folder in the library because I have a nested folder for each sales office.

Am I approaching this issue all wrong? Should I create a library for each location instead? And if so, how can I make it so that on the sharepoint 'home page' I can have a list of all the libaries. That way a manager can login to the web view and then easily just click on the name of the library assigned to their sales office.

I am not asking stackexchange to do my work for me, I am just new to sharepoint and want to make sure I get things set up the right way the first time. I'd like some pointers on what direction I should head in and if anybody else has been in a similar situation.

ofc the easiest solution is simply using each managers personal skydrive for this, but I would rather these documents are kept seperate from personal documents and this makes it easier to control access if one manager leaves and another takes their place.

Answer 1

If it's only photos that you are working with here, use Picture libraries instead of Document libraries.

Give everyone who needs access, access to that library. Then create folders for each Center. If you don't already have it, create new groups; 1 per Center.
In the Picture library break permission inheritance and add the new Center groups to their associated folders.

When this is done, you should have the library structure in place as well as permissions/security.

This approach stores all the photos at one location and you can just dump the AppPart/List view web part for the Picture library on the "Home" page. This way managers can just log on to the website and see all the submitted photos right on the home page, and because of the folder and permission structure, they can only see their submissions.

About the URL issue, the limit is at 260 characters as far as I'm aware, so consider keeping short names for the images - or at least as short as possible. But with them being placed on root level (presumably) that issue should die out.

Answer 2

Did you try to create a separate Library for each sales center and on that library stop inheritance and assign the unique permissions so that Sales center can see only the their library.

I think you need to give them view permission on the page where all your library's link will. he may see all sales center's library but if he click other than his own, he will get access denied.

By the way, how many user in the each sales center?

Answer 3

Well for now we are sticking with DropBox, because we have two Mac users in the company that are the primary users of these photographs, and there is just no easy way to deal with SharePoint libraries on OSX. The web view does not allow for bulk downloads/uploads and until there's a SkyDrive Pro application, there's not going to be an easy way to manage the file.

We will be moving forward with Sharepoint libaries for things like HR documents and standard paperwork.

Thanks for the suggestions but in the end it didn't matter because of lack of OSX support.