SharePoint Sites Best Practice - Project
Hello,
I am looking for a a few ideas about how best to setup our project specific sites in SharePoint online (When I say project I don't mean anything to do with MS Project or the Project site template). We have recently started migrating to M365 from our current on-premises file server. We are a major project based company (1-2 major projects per year) with multiple departments that run their own corporate sites but primarily documents and files are stored within a Project Folder. We have a significant field team that works on the project with oversight from a few people that make up corporate level support. An example of some of our departments:
- Project Management
- Project Controls
- Quality
- Environment
- Safety
- Procurement
- Accounts Payable
- Transportation
- Document Control
Currently how a project is handled is a folder on the server is created and each department has their own subfolder under that with specific permissions to limit access to the more sensitive folders. The way that I am considering setting the site up is to create a general "Projects" Hub site (for navigation purposes between projects) then create project specific teams and associate those teams sites with the hub. I was then thinking about creating private or public channels under the project team. Some of the limitations I'm running into are:
- there does not seem to be the ability for anyone but team owners to control access permissions in the private channels/site. Ideally department leads would have the ability to add members to their project department area.
- I don't like the way Private channels create their own site that are essentially invisible except through Teams or PowerShell. This is alleviated somewhat by using the navigation on the main project site and adding the links.
- I need the Project managers and Corporate executives to have an easy way to navigate to each element within the project, having disconnected sites makes it more difficult especially for those who won't be using it everyday.
Some of the other considerations I'm having:
- Setup a Hub site per project and create a project specific department team sites for each and associate them with the project hub.
- This doesn't seem to solve the limitations but I'm not sure it's a good idea to have that many hub sites floating around.
- How do you define which departments need their own site when some have 50 files for the project and others have 50,000.
- this maybe makes sense for our multi-year projects but seems excessive for our smaller 3-4 month projects
- Setup a single team site (with high level Hub) and build the document library to essentially mirror our current project document libraries. Set the site to read only for high level folders and restrict access to content. Then assign individual department groups full control access to their folders.
- this would be the most seamless transition for people to move to SharePoint.
- It seems that it would limit some of the features of Teams.
- Create a single Team site as in #2 but create a second document library within the site to hold all project documents (the first will have the department channel folders created with the channel). I can then "add cloud storage" within the department channels to link to the correct Document Library Folder.
- this runs the risk of having files show up under both the team channel folder and the correct Project folder.
Any Comments or Insights would be greatly appreciated
