I'm interested to see how different people organise their SharePoint installations in terms of Web Applications, Site Collections and Sites.
Additionally, has anyone changed their architecture as they migrated between Sharepoint versions?
For starters here is how we have done it where I work.
We started off with SharePoint 2003, with the assistance of a consultancy, and organised it as follows:
- http://intranet web application. This was viewed as a SharePoint Portal Server application housing our corporate wide information, search etc.
- http://teams. This was viewed as a Windows SharePoint Server application, housing all our team sites. Each team sites was a single Site Collection, generally only containing a top level site.
- http://mysites. Obviously My Sites.
- http://sandbox. A web app for playing around with sharepoint functionality, separate from any real content. This web app also uses a different shared service provider so that more features can be tested out.
When we migrated to Office SharePoint Server 2007 we didn't make any radical changes to the architecture - we just migrated the data between the two installations.
I have never been convinced that the distinction between the SPS and WSS functionality was valid, and thus that we needed to split out our corporate and team level site collections into two web applications, although I am not sure we suffered anything more than a bit of confusion as a result.
If I were setting up from scratch (which may be the case if I get a green light to upgrade to SharePoint 2010), I think I would merge the intranet and teams web applications, and create site collections for each department, and organise the teams at this level. Anything that would support aggregation of content at the departmental or corporate level would be great!
So - how have you done it, and how would you change things if you could start over?