Forum Discussion
Teamsite without subsites
Even without your IT department's mandate not to use subsites, you still have some options that could work out better than site collections would have anyway.
I would propose you use a modern Team site and create as many document libraries as you have departments, with all departments having access rights to the Site but different rights per library as desired by your user group. If your location is fairly open with its documents, you could conceivably have a situation where all departments have Read to all libraries and only Contribute to their own department's library. If some or all of your location's departments want to stay private, the unique permissions on each document library will protect those privacy requirements as long as your permission structure is set up correctly.
*EDIT* Alternatively, you could give each department its own Modern Team site and wait for Hub Sites to roll out. If Hub Sites aren't on the immediate horizon for rollout, or if they don't accomplish the everything Microsoft promises they will right away, you would need to have some fairly redundant permissions structures across each of these Team site/collections to grant whatever permissions are required department-to-department.
Hope that helps!
Matt Coats I really like this option, thanks! I'm just afraid it's gonna be hard to manage this.
Salvatore Biscari The important thing I have to do right now is to make sure they can share the files with each other. And some of the information within a department is classified and other files are available for everyone.
jcgonzalezmartin I don't really have a technical background so doing this automatically isn't an option. It seems like more work to create site collections instead of different libraries or am I seeing this wrong?
- Deleted you mention some files are classified. If this is the case your business should also look at Information Protection within Office 365. This isn’t solely the provenance of SharePoint so your Office 365 global administration should work with you on this. By applying labelling and classification your company’s documents will be protected and permissioned correctly. You have been given a significant responsibility and both your IT function and business governance needs to assist you. Two hundred users is a high number of users to manage and I’m assuming you will have joiners/movers/leavers in your org too. As everyone else has said planning is key. Hope this assists!
- Thanks! All the advice is welcome :)
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SharePoint is a complex environment, so I think that before doing anything you should have a clear idea of your present and future requirements, if possible. Otherwise, you could end with a structure that is too difficult to change in order to fulfill future requirements that you have skipped today...
Anyway, I will try to shortly list some points:
- If you need Groups features (conversation, notebook, Teams, Planner, etc), then create a Group for each department. Each Group corresponds to a site collection and hence to a Modern team site and to a main document library with its own permissions, which is easy to understand and easy to manage.
- Creating a single Group with multiple libraries having different permissions is not recommended, because, as a rule of thumb, it is better to not manipulate permissions in Groups.
- If you don't need Groups features, you could create a classic site collection (i.e. without an associated Group) for each department. In such a way, you will have anyway a separate team site, a separate document library, and separate permissions for each department. In practice, it is the same scenario as having multiple Groups, but of course without the additional Group machinery.
- Creating a single classic site collection with multiple libraries, having different permissions, is viable, but you should be very careful in managing the unique permissions for each library. I have seen too many times data leaking due to sloppy permissions management...
- The current trend is to not use subsites, so if it is not strictly necessary, avoid them in any case.
Just my two cents...
Thanks for your input!
I looked more into the Groups, but this isn't in any way related to the main site collection. This way it's going to be a lot of work to make it work for all the departments. The same thing with several site collections.
I would like to use the site colums with metadata, navigation and site templates for multiple sites so it's going to cost me a lot of time to create the same thing over and over again.
See my latest reaction to the post to see which option I chose.
- If you cannot automate Site Collection creation and you have to do it manually, yes it is going to imply more work...that's the reason we automation is something basic here
Ah okay, got it!
