MOSS 2007 Site Navigation - Topical Versus Organizational

I, quite often, I am asked and discuss the manner in which an Intranet Portal site should be structured.  Meaning, is it best to structure sites in an organization or topical manner.  More often than not, I find business units and departments want to keep their identity and find it easier to manage their own content in a more centralized location.  However, simply structuring your Intranet Portal sites from an organizational perspective may not be the easiest way for users to find answers and discover content.  More often I find end users locate information from a topical approach.

Let me further provide an example.  In most organizations Policies and Procedures are maintained by numerous business units and departments; I'll use Finance and Human Resources for my example.  Members of the Finance and Human Resources departments will find it easier to maintain their specific Policies and Procedures on their respective Finance and Human Resources sites.  Why?  Because each are maintaining a lot more than just Policies and Procedures and to attempt to remember where the various types of data is stored is very inconvenient for them.  They would prefer to go to a single location, i.e. their site, where their identity is maintained, and manage content.  To be honest, this is a perfectly reasonable wish.  If we make the creation and maintenance of content difficult, the Intranet will not be kept up to date.  There is a much better chance of content staying fresh if we make the content authors job easy.

Now for the end user...  There comes a need to find the current procedure for expense reporting.  Is this being maintained by the Finance or Human Resource department?  It's done differently in various organizations; unless the user knows, they will have to check both department sites to find what they are looking for.  This is a simple example, but will multiply itself as your Intranet content grows.

There is always many ways to implement your Intranet Portal, I am going to provide you with one approach to handle the above business problem.  This approach seems to work well in many organizations.

In these specific situations, give both the content owners/authors and end users the best of both worlds.  It's not a case of which navigation model is better, it's a matter of providing both.  It is quite common to provide multiple navigation models for various types of users.  You can use permissions and audiences to further narrow what is visible to various users.  The example site structure below contains a Human Resources and Finance departmental site.  These sites are where the departments maintain their identity and their specific content is maintained; thus the departmental users goals have been satisfied.  The Corporate Policies and Procedures site is used to aggregate and display information to end users; thus satisfying the end users need to not care where the information is derived.

As I said above, this example is simple; however, I hope it conveys the concept.

1. Store content where it is easy for content owners to manage.  If you do this, the chances of the content staying fresh is greater.
2. Create additional navigation, as needed, to facilitate the location of information from a topical approach.