Building an Intranet and Document management system using SharePoint Online. I really like to get your opinion/ suggestions on the following thoughts.
1. Intranet- What I think the best way to going forward is having a Hub site as the main/ Parent site and all other individual departmental sites (communications sites) associate to the Hub site. All staff get read access to the whole Intranet and dedicated staff(s) from each department will get Edit permission to their departmental communication site. Only the Intranet owner will have edit access to the Hub site.
Published versions of policies and guidelines, forms, templates should available in intranet for all staff access. Obviously news, events, and other useful webparts.
Having a redirection from the SharePoint Home/root site to this Hub site.
2. Document management system- Better to give each department a SharePoint team site ( without O365 group) for their collaboration and to store content, we can call this site as departmental main content Site. Depending on the business requirement departments’ staff can have read access to each other departmental content site or only a dedicated libraries or restricted the whole department site.
Again depend on the department requirements they might need only a one SharePoint site or couple of sites as the departmental collaboration and content store.
Eg- HR department required a Team site for the whole HR team to collaboration and content store. But, they might need a separate HR site which have very restricted access, allow access only for HR manager (not for other staff members in HR team) and organisational executives.
Also they might need another team site to have a long term cross collaboration with some other departmental staff.
What is your opinion on this? And What is the best way to set up the navigation for individual departments.
3. Project site- If your team is working on a project for a short term period, I think it is best to create a MS Teams that will give more collaboration features such as Chat, call, screen share, Planner , OneNote, SharePoint etc.
Also MS Teams is a good option if you are working on a project with cross collaboration with other department’s staff. Specially if you are collaboration on B2B, MS Teams is a really good option.
But any content marked as a record/ published must move to the relevant DMS SharePoint site and archive the MS teams if it no longer required. This will be a Teams owner(s) responsibility.
4. As a common best practice and to avoiding buried content inside folders and to provide an effective search, I would recommend to have a flat structure with document set content type, Metadata tagging, group by tagged metadata. Also this will helps to reduce the length of the document library and provide the drill down option within the document library, etc.
Thanks in advance for your valuable inputs and suggestions.
