Managing & Maintaining sites for our departments

Question

I want to build sites (sub sites or site collections) for each of our departments, named:-

• HR.

• Finance

• Operations

The entire sites will share the following :-

• Each site will have four lists:-

  • Events
  • Risks
  • Issue and problems
  • General issues

• Where each list will have the same columns.

But each site will have these unique settings:-

• Each site will have unique permission on who can read/edit/approve.

• Although they share the same lists & columns. But for the drop-down columns each site will have different choices. For example there is a drop down column named “Area” and for the HR the Area choices are different from the Area choices for the finance, and so on…

• Also there is a “People or Group” column at each list named “Assigned to” , where this column will be linked to different group at each site, as there will be for example “HR Approval” group , “Finance Approval”, etc

So I need to know how I can approach these:-

• In general I prefer to create a site collection for each dept,rather than creating different sub sites. since each site will have different permissions

• But not sure how I can define a CT , for example “Events CT”, and share it among all the site collections. Baring in mind that some CT's columns will be different ; such as the drop down lists choices and people or group column.

So can anyone advice how I need to design my sites in a way that facilitate maintainability?

Answer 1

In my opinion, I'd build it for growth off the bat and have each department in a site collection, with a managed path--"sites" is fine

http://sharepoint/sites/hr 
http://sharepoint/sites/finance
http://sharepoint/sites/operations

With each site collection there will be a site collection specific, generated set of SharePoint groups--Visitors, Members, and Owners--that you can add users or AD groups to after the fact.

The list/columns will be completely different and even though they may be the same in behavior, there is no need to link them due to the requirements of each site being different values. It would be different if all the values were the same, you could create a managed metadata column that had manually added terms.