Sharepoint 2010: company with several departments site structure question

Question

I have to create a team site with Sharepoint 2010 for a company that has several departments. Requirements (simplified) are:

Top Menu: company / department-A / department-B

Main-page (default, home page):

• company news
• department-A tasks
• department-B tasks
• company quick launch menu (on the left)

Department-A-page

• department-A news
• department-A tasks
• department-A quick launch menu (on the left)

Department-B-page

• department-B news
• department-B tasks
• department-B quick launch menu (on the left)

So I have 2 lists of departments tasks to share between pages. I have to create personalized quick launch menu per each page (home, department-A, department-B) also.

How can I do this?

If I create several site pages (one page per department) and customize top level menu, then I can't customize quick launch menu per page. Because it seems to be the only one for the whole site.

If I create nested team sites (one site per department) I can't share task lists anymore?

What are the ways to customize quick launch menu per every page or share lists between sites?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

If you are going to allow the departments to customize their own quick launch and so forth, then going with the nested sites looks to be your best option. If you have SharePoint 2010 Standard or Enterprise, you could use something like the Content Query Web Part to roll up task lists into one. If you are using Foundation, you could still write something with Visual Studio. We have written a Silverlight web part, for example, that displays all the tasks for a user in a single view.

There are also third party products available to do the trick. Here is an example of a list rollup web part on the market: http://store.bamboosolutions.com/ps-32-5-list-rollup-web-part.aspx