Forum Discussion
Teamsite without subsites
I would like to thank all of you for your help! Again, I heard so many different things and I looked into all the options and I made my conclusion:
Even if my company doesn't prefer it, I'm going to make subsites. I think building a site on my own for a whole company is really hard and I'm not that experienced. The people who work here aren't that experienced as well so whatever I tell them, they believe it. So I'm thinking about making multiple employees administrator and just give them some subsites to manage. This way the job can be devided and it's not going to be a lot of work for just one person in the end.
- AnonymousApr 25, 2018Thank you. A lot of sites are talking about subsites so to me this seems logic. I honestly don't really understand what the problem is with subsites, there's a reason they excist right? Creating about ten site collections for departments with no more than fifteen employees each, seems like a lot of work.
- Matt CoatsApr 25, 2018Iron Contributor
Deleted, while I am a user of subsites in specific situations, I would encourage you to consider this: if you intend to grant each department control of their subsite and they adopt SharePoint well, that they all exist under one site collection to begin with will limit what they are able to do and may prevent them from "growing" their SharePoint environment because they are restricted to the rules of that site collection.
While this is not necessarily a bad thing for an organization learning how to use SharePoint (less of a functionality flood), it does present a situation where your power users are running into walls almost immediately that wouldn't be there if they did have a site collection available to them. For example, handling external users--if any one of your departments sees a need to allow external users and another sees a need to completely prevent external access, resolving those requirements and enforcing those security needs in one site collection is far more difficult (and may actually be impossible, would require creating very specific security roles at best) than setting up multiple site collections. Navigation is another limiting factor--if there are two competing visions of how navigation should be at the "global" level, somebody loses that battle when they might not if they had their own site collection.
- John WynneApr 25, 2018Silver ContributorVery briefly subsites are now quite legacy. They are there for backward compatibility but there are now better solutions in SPO. I can’t really comment on the information architecture for your company but ten site collections is not huge for around 150 users. You may find a local SharePoint group who can give you a little more advice. My experience is that what seems like a lot of work now has a huge payback later. If you’re staying for any time with your company I’d take the effort upfront. Honestly, the very best of luck and I hope all goes well!