How do you structure your department SharePoints? One central main site?

[benward1]

Excluding any hub associations, could I please ask how other schools are designing their SharePoints. I have set up separate SharePoint sites for curriculum subjects (Maths, English etc), but was curious about the administration side. We have an Admin Portal network drive and I could replicate this with an Administration site with sub folders for say "Catering", "Facilities", "Admissions", or is the best option to separate these into sites too? 

[DalekSec]

Separate all sites, only madmen put them on one.

 

Issues with having them on one; 

 

File permissions being a PITA to manage, multiple sites you can do permissions by security groups etc

OneDrive syncing, you would have to sync the entire lot, where as multiple you can sync the only ones you need

[Rob_D]

We use Cloud Design Box for our SharePoint so that's laregly driven how thigns work for us, espeically on the curriculum side where we have staff only Sites/teams for each Currculum area, and then staff and student sites for teaching resources in each subject.

On the non-teaching side, we have what CDB calls Collaboration Sites (SharePoints with teams attached, that are only shared with that department) for all the main support departments (Office, HR, Finanace, ICT, Maintenance, Catering, Medical, etc), then CDB Communication sites (sahrepoint pages without teams and with less stroage as default, that are shared with most/all staff/student) for things like, school policies, staff directories, CPD, First Aid). And then we still have a general "Staff Shared" site where all the things that don't really fit anywhere else go.

 

This seems to be working well for us, but I don't think there's a best way to do it.

Having a single site with folder level permissions is easier to set up and (I'm guessing) looks more like your local "Shared Area" so there's less of a learning curve/resistance from staff. But managing all the permissions and keeping everything tidy is going to largely fall on IT Support (as it did with the local Shared Area), and you'll have to keep on top of the stroage as SP sites only have 1TB by default (but can go up to 25TB)

 

Having multiple sites gives users more ownership and setting permissions largely at the site or library level makes it easier to see who's got permissions, these combined allow staff to manage their own shared areas more. And if you've got things like staff directories or similar "information for all staff" type folders, then making them into a sharepoint page can be more user firendly. The flipside being it's very different from having the single bucket of files that IT Support manage for us, so there's more staff training and acilimitisation (which IME leads to more staff pushback). And it takes longer to set up and get right in the first place.

 

For example when we first move to SharePoint during lockdown, we did a single site with everything on and it took a couple of hours to set up. What we have now has taken the best part of a year to get right.

 

That said, if you're already doing "subject/department sites" on the Currculum side and it's working okay and you've not had much staff pushback, then I'd continue that on the non-teaching side.

[E_G_R2]

I've gone with Microsoft, one for each faculty/department under a hub site.  Basically a 'team' for each team though I use communication sites. Audience targeting for the menu's that way they only see the sites that they need to in the menu.

 

Permissions is then simple, Owners, Members and Visitors. Permissions handles by security groups in AD so if teacher joins and is put in group bang they have access.

 

 

[sraper]

On 16/02/2026 at 08:33, DalekSec said:

Separate all sites, only madmen put them on one.

 

Issues with having them on one; 

 

File permissions being a PITA to manage, multiple sites you can do permissions by security groups etc

OneDrive syncing, you would have to sync the entire lot, where as multiple you can sync the only ones you need

Totally this.

One of the primary schools I support has one huge "Staff Shared" site - many 100's Gbs in size and its a nightmare especially due to rogue OneDrive syncing.

e.g a member of staff will "clean" up a folder - two days late they come back and all the content has magically returned and when you check it points to some other random member of staff having created that contents again - someone who had no reason to be working on those folders - it looks like the OneDrive service on their computer "Ohh Looks some files have gone missing - let me restore them for you"

 

So yes keep each one small and give access to only those who need them

[bicky]

We moved to SharePoint since 2016/17 with individual site for each department. Main homepage has link to each site.

Since last year we moved few departments to Teams, each department has dedicated Teams + SharePoint site that comes with it.