MS deprecated the features we need for our work. How do I determine what SP structure is best?
I am not IT or related. I'm just a user who figured out how make SP do what we needed and built a solution - over 10 years ago. Suddenly, we cannot make new subsites using our publishing template (I had gotten around scripting bans for creating new templates). No, I didn't realize it was getting co.pletely turned off.
We mainly use SP for the co-authoring. If it wasn't for that, we could make a NAS work. We have administrative cases where we prepare and house testimony, exhibits, discovery, administrative, and legal documents. We will have dozens of people working on each case at one time. Each case will have thousands of documents. Our archival storage is NAS. We may have a dozen large cases in play at one time.
Our current structure is a classic site collection with sooo many nested subsides - I did not know that was a problem when I created it. We do keep it to 3 levels. The main benefit is our use of permissions groups to manage who can see what and do what where. We also use Metadata rather than folders for document organization.
We have the parent, a few children that organize things like which state it applies to, administrative, etc. Then the subs under that are the working sites. We do not use chat like features or other "teams" like functions. We have a dedicated set of employees who manage each site and keep things working.
I am thinking communication sites that link to a hub. It seems like a pain because now we have roll up KPI data that is easily accessed within the site collection. I understand a hub will allow searching in each child site (which is absolutely key.) So I am assuming the KPI roll up won't be a problem.
My main concern is permissions. Now we have a few standing permissions groups that are easy to use and control. How will that work with a bunch of sites? We can't use the permission groups we already have and we need to be able to use the same groups and have multiple people administer them. We don't want the wild west with people doing something different on each site.
Now we have a template for the site that provides the organization and functionality we need. Can we create a template that can create new sites set up like we need?
If I can figure out how to best do this, I think I can build something pretty quickly. (I dont see us doing a wholesale migration. Just brute force moving some things and going foward with new cases.)