Forum Discussion
SharePoint Site Plan
Hi guys, a bit new to SharePoint so I need some help for SharePoint Site architecture for multiple companies including file sharing and access.
Background:
Our company consists of one company with 8 "sub-companies" all with:
- different companies
- MAIN COMPANY
- Company abc
- Company xyz
- Company klm etc.
- MAIN COMPANY
- different domains
- different tenants on Azure AD
- different employees having rights to different files
We are moving from a on-prem server to a hybrid server (365 & on-prem). Some of our applications (accounting, payroll, etc.) will be kept on the on-premise server and all files (Excel, Word, etc.) will be moved to 365, hence the SharePoint sites.
What we want:
We want to build a SharePoint site (Home Page) for the MAIN COMPANY and subsites for each company (Company abc, xzy, klm, etc.).
The MAIN COMPANY will house:
- HR Documents
- Policies and Procedures
- Leave forms
- etc.
- IT Documents
- Policies and Procedures
- Other forms
- etc.
- Other Documents
The sub sites for each company (Company abc, xzy, klm, etc.) should have sub folders (file sharing for collaboration) for different departments within each company:
- Finance
- Marketing
- Operations, etc.
These should have different access permissions based on the employee level (Manager vs Clerk vs EXCO)
We have the following architectural structure in mind:
We would like:
- for all employees across all companies regardless of employee level to access the HOME PAGE as well as the content (Policies and Procedures, Training Material, etc.)
- create links to the subsites for each company to access files and folders to collaborate on (with certain access permissions)
We would then have:
- HR document sharing (collaboration) in a separate site for obvious reasons
- IT Document sharing for the IT Department only - Optional
Our Challenges:
Our challenges sits with the permissions to grant as we have different domains. We would then create the MAIN COMPANY in one tenant (Azure AD) and create guest users for each company to allow file sharing across companies.
We also have growth in mind (adding new companies under the MAIN COMPANY)
Assistance needed:
- Is this the correct approach?
- Any other suggestions would be welcomed
- Can we get some videos on this on how to create something like this?
- RobElliottSilver Contributor
ClaudeV2240 Microsoft no longer recommends subsites and will eventually deprecate them. It would be better for you to use a hub site and associated sites approach. The top level hub site would be your main company site. Then each company site would be a separate site but associated to the top level site and would automatically assume a common color theme across all sites in the hub based on the theme of the top level site. This approach makes permissioning easier, it keeps the different company sites separate but still part of the main company, it allows searching across all the sites in the hub, and it allows for news to flow up from each site to the top level site if you want to do that - we do that for our intranet which has a hub/associated sites approach.
Come back with any questions about this.
Rob
Los Gallardos
Intranet, SharePoint and Power Platform Manager (and classic 1967 Morris Traveller driver)- ClaudeV2240Copper Contributor
RobElliott thanks for the feedback. My problem sits with the sharing of documents across multiple companies. Will this eliminate the problem with multiple tenants?
- RobElliottSilver ContributorNo I don't think so, all sites in a hub need to be in the same tenant as far as I am aware.