I know that this is a very broad question and I am looking for a very broad answer. We are beginning to plan our Sharepoint deployment in the Online, Office 365 version of the software. We are open to a hybrid setup if necessary, but would rather contain everything in the cloud as MS is slowly moving there anyway.

We have a company of roughly 250 employees. They are broken into roughly 15 planning teams. We have roughly 150 clients. Each client has roughly 10-30 projects in a given year. That is the basis of our setup.

Permissions are based on the teams, but there are little sub-teams of IT, Research, Reporting and stuff like that.

We initially thought we would set it up under one site container, but the 2000 subsite limitation per site-container put a kibash on that. Initially, I was planning on creating a workflow that would create a new project under that client as a subsite in a templated way. Clearly that isn't going to work as I first thought.

Automating processes is our number one goal (maybe 1a, if you consider file storage and organization as maybe a number one goal). My natural inclination would be to create a site collection for each client now, with the projects still as subsites, but that brings in a higher level of complexion than I am comfortable with at this point...I think.

Can I automate the creation of these "Client" site-collections? Is that the best method? Can I template a site-collection so that I can build one and expect the other ones to look the same way? Will having approx 250 site collections limit my installation's ability to operate?

Basically, am I missing something?

Thanks.

~Joe Fedorowicz

as you mention, the topic of Information Architecture is very broad. So while generalities can be made, it's just as easy that you will encounter problems in the future due to unknown semantics.

That said... if you're already bias towards Office 365, consider the following:

- you will only ever have one URL... it will be TenantName.SharePoint.com

- separate site collections can only exist under the following URLs: /Teams/* and /Sites/*

- allowing external users is defined per site collection

- all users within a site collection are visible to each other (so if you need clients to be unaware of each other, don't put them in one site collection).

- you have little control over each site's template. MS provides some defaults... and they can be customized... but use of custom templates isn't intuitive (or default)... further, it should be EXPECTED that each site may be customized to better suit its needs... perhaps some teams need task lists, while others don't.

those are just the first few thoughts that come to mind

Hi Joe, I would handle this differently. Sites should be set up based on permissions, and there should only be an additional site if the permissions need to be different from the other site(s). With that said, I would create a site for each client and keep all of the projects for that client in the same site. Add and remove team members as necessary/if necessary.