My organization's current SharePoint structure is basically a big mess. Between upgrades, lack of prior administrator and user knowledge, and rampant granting of permissions, I have decided that it is probably time to do something about it. Even though I have recognized the need to do so I, unfortunately, also lack the experience with SharePoint to dive right in and take care of it. I have spent a lot of time looking through books and websites, but have not found anything that specifically helps me in my current situation. I know the scope of where I'm going with this is too enormous to be solved in a forum post, but I think I have narrowed down a few specific questions that, if answered, would help me decide how I want to proceed. The way I see it is that I have two options. 1) Try to fix the mess where it is and 2) start over. I would REALLY like to start over, but given that there is a lot of user created content stored within the sites and subsites etc I'm not sure that starting over would be the best path to choose. So, to the questions: 1) Are there any web/published resources that are tailored towards this type of scenario? 2) If I try to fix the mess where it is, I will undoubtedly remove permissions, move sites, and generally do a lot of other temporary stuff that will make users angry. Does SharePoint offer some sort of way that I can work in parallel to the live site, but not affect day-to-day users? 3) Can content be copied between web applications? 4) Can content be copied between site collections? I will continute my search for these answers, but any help or pointers or links anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

How do you know its a mess? It might be exactly how your end users actually want it to be! Perhaps a new strategy is needed. Provide an exemplar site, and publicise it. Show how a clean well managed site structure can save time and effort. Content can be copied and moved, just look at explorer view at the simplest level, or export import. Without your site owners taking part though you'll be wasting your time. You need to identify your business driver for this and make sure eveyone knows wht that is and why its important to them as well as you. Regards John Timney (MVP)

Thanks for your response! Your comments have brought up a few good points that I didn't mention before. Our usage of SharePoint over the past couple of years was never really planned out. My understanding is that SharePoint was rolled out here without any of the end users really knowing anything about it. On top of that, I don't think the IT department put much (or any) thought into its organization when initially setting it up. Basically it was thrown out there without anyone knowing how to use/administrate it. So, now we have a few problems. First, we're stuck with a structure that does not effectively match our organizational hierarchy. Secondly, permissions were not set up correctly in the first place and people who shouldn't have been able to grant other people permission for certain sites/lists/etc have been doing so for the last couple of years (not to mention changing the permissions on almost all of the default groups that SP sets up). I am not a SP expert, but I at least have some idea of how it should be used and configured after having casually administrated it (emphasis on casually) for the last 10 months. Looking through the explorer view and permission listings, though, just blow my mind. Nothing is set up how it should be given our organizational structure. I agree with your idea of a new strategy and, fortunately, I am not alone in thinking that way. I have already set up a demonstration of how I believe our site structure should be laid out and so far everyone I've shown it to has agreed. It would be nice to start from scratch so I could get the permissions and structure right, if it wasn't for all the content people have created. I really don't want to mess with the content , I'd just like to take their stuff (or even entire team sites, when possible) and copy them to a clean instance of SP. Since my initial post I did find that stsadm.exe can help with moving content from place to place so I have been experimenting with that. I guess, in the end, this is more of a philosophical question about the best way to clean up a very very unclean SharePoint site. Thanks.

Have you defined the tangible business benefits of your proposed change?