In my summit class, I discuss the age-old question of when do we create new sites vs. new areas vs. new portals. I’ve learned through experience that there are some benchmark factors of when to do each. Here goes:
I. Create a new site – this shouldn’t be on the radar screen of a portal admin. End-users will manage this and they will create new sites within a site collection when needed. Don’t forget this is a distributed administrative architecture. Portal admins don’t create new sites. Instead, portal admins create A) new stand-alone site collections via a new virtual server, B) new portals and/or C) extended and mapped virtual servers to existing content. For the most part, portal admins, IMHO, should not be focused on creating new site collections that are embedded in a managed path of a virtual server. To be sure, some environments require this level of granular administration, but I think this can be managed by power users or even end-users themselves. I’m happy to discuss this point more if there are objections to this.
II. Create a new area: the reason that we create new areas is to help do the three things that portals do best: aggregate, organize and present. If an area helps us do one or more of these three things, then a new area is probably needed.
III. Create a new portal: this is more tricky because we can probably accomplish most of what a new portal will accomplish via new areas within an existing portal. So, here are the judgement calls for creating a new portal:
a. There is a unique taxonomy that requires a separate portal
b. There is a large enough and unique enough audience that a separate portal is necessary
c. There is such a different set of information that needs to be consumed and it is a large enough set that a new portal is probably in order
d. The customer (internal stakeholder) is willing to “pay for it” – meaning they will permanent devote both $$ and human resources to help manage the portal
e. Politics – what manager isn’t going to say “Yes” to this question: “wouldn’t you really rather be the master of your own portal?” Politics drives a lot of SharePoint designs today
These are all shades of gray on a continuum and sometimes, one criteria will drive the decision whereas other times, a balance between the criteria will drive a different decision. I personally like to see clients genuinely understand this and then move forward with their own decisions as opposed to me making their decisions for them. I’d rather teach them how to fish than catch the fish for them. I trust this helps.
Bill English
Mindsharp