Site Hierarchies

Determining the site hierarchy of your SharePoint implementation may seem like a straightforward task: break out the latest organizational chart and start creating sites to match this structure. While this isn’t always a bad approach, it's important to understand the business, how it is broken down, and how each unit interacts with the others. Some common breakdowns of site hierarchies include:

• Line of Business
• Geography
• Product Line
• Organization Chart

To really know the business and its structure, it's important to get input from different people within different levels of the organization. What you will find is that these individuals or groups have slightly different hierarchies based on their level and needs within the business. A good approach to determining a logical hierarchy is to work with the different business units to get their take on a hierarchy. Once all the feedback from each group is captured, a hierarchy can be created based on the feedback. Keep in mind this can be done at a high level, but also at a lower level within each business unit. The starting and ending point of the hierarchy is dependent upon the size of the business. Once a common hierarchy has been determined, be sure to share the results with the business, as this provides a great opportunity to get buy-in and show that feedback was taken into consideration.