I wanted to say a few things that may help when deciding upon when a Farm, Web Application, Content Database and Site Collection are necessary.  For the purposes of this discussion I am defining a Large organization as any organization implementing a medium to large server farm.  A small organization would be one using a single server farm.

 

First think of these items in terms of how we suggest implementing Active Directory:

 

Web Farm is Like a AD Forrest

Web Application is Like a AD Domain

Content Database is Like an AD Partition

Site Collection is like an AD Organizational Unit

 

 

Web Farm:

You need to consider separate Web Farms for Very Large Organizations where political or Very Large Implementations are needed such as separate Shared Service Providers(Max 8 per farm) are required.

 

Web Application:

Consider Web Applications when you need to define Zones and Policies that are unique.

 

Content Database:

The recommended limit is 100 GB.  The main thought here is Disaster Recovery time and SQL Performance.

 

Site Collections:

In smaller organizations, separate site collections organized by business units is appropriate.  In a  large organization, I would recommend a separate site collection for each high level team.  Focus your efforts upon building a wide rather than deep hierarchy. Site collections will allow the IT department freedom to maintain just application itself without the worry of security or content hierarchy maintenance. The following is a list of what an individual site collection offers.

 

For the Users:

  • Dedicated Recycle bins
  • Dedicated usage Reports
  • Distributed administration (site collection administrators)
  • Dedicated search scopes, keywords, and best-bets
  • Custom feature deployments
  • Dedicated language translation maintenance
  • Dedicated galleries for web parts, master pages, content types, site columns, site templates, and list templates
  • Dedicated shared libraries, such as site collection images and site collection styles
  • Dedicated real estate (Self Containment)

For the IT Administrators:

  • Site quota templates
  • Distributed administration
  • Site locking
  • Database maintenance options
  • Backup / Restore abilities
  • Content Deployments
  • InfoPath forms services global template targeting

Some good links to read that may help:

·         http://www.sharepointblogs.com/llowevad/archive/2007/11/09/when-to-use-site-collections-vs-sub-sites.aspx

·         http://www.sharepointblogs.com/llowevad/archive/2007/06/25/site-collection-logical-architecture.aspx