Advice needed for new Intranet - site structure

Question

I'm an intern working on an intranet for a small company that may potentially expand in size. The company has a few departments with an engineering department that has different fields. They also have project sites.

I was planning on structuring the site as follows:

    Home(site collection)
    -Projects (site collection)
    --project x(subsite)
    --project y(subsite)
    -Departments(site collection)
    --HR(subsite)
    --Finance(subsite)
    --Engineering(site collection)
    --- Engineering field x(subsite)
    --- Engineering field y(subsite)

Is it possible to have site collections inside other site collections? Is there a better way to structure this?

Answer 1

Their are many things to think before the designing intranet site.

• Number of user
• usage type( collaboration, project management etc)
• security( unique permissions or shared), do you want HR employee access full site or vice versa.
• Storage

Once you have above then you can design a site collections.

You cant have a site collection in Site collection rather you can create a Sub-site under a site collection using the team, proj, blog etc templates. In you scenrio you can do like this.

Home(site collection)
    -Projects (**Subsite**)
    --project x(subsite)
    --project y(subsite)
    -Departments(**Subsite**)
    --HR(subsite)
    --Finance(subsite)
    -Engineering(**subsite**)
    -- Engineering field x(subsite)
    -- Engineering field y(subsite)

this picture will explain you the same thing,

It is upto requirement, sometime a separate site collection is required for each department.

Also check this http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sgoodyear/archive/2009/07/25/determining-between-sharepoint-site-collections-and-sub-sites.aspx