I don't want to have Site Collections other than my portal...[MOSS 2007]

Now with MOSS converting all the SPS2003 Portal Areas in to Sub Sites we can take advantage of all the features that a site can have. Consistant security, features, STSADM commands etc. Yes you can Export a Site Collection and Import as Sub Site under the MOSS Portal and bind to your global navigation! How cool is that..

Now my user wants to get rid of all the site collection under the /Sites or any such managed path and place them under the Portal. So that it looks like one nice Portal and you can navigate anywhere.

I said, well you are going to have one big bloated site collection and other repurcation of such approach. Here I wanted to share my thoughts on this design approach:

by default all the sites that any user creates, under the umbrella of portal, gets created under the portal with the respective url.

Pros:

• Every site is a sub site and is stitched to the global navigation.
  
• Thus is easier to navigate.
  
• Consistent branding.
  
• Consistent security and easy to manage by creating a global SharePoint Groups.
  
• Easy to administer and enforce governance/policy.

Cons:

• Single site collection cannot be split across multiple content databases.
  
• Limits future growth for potential content heavy portal.
  
• My introduce longer time to back up and restore, thus requiring a longer SLA for backup and restore.

Recommendation:

• Content Databases should fit your Backup/Restore SLA in case of disaster.
  
• With single portal site collection “stsadm export” can be scripted out to implement individual backups. These scripts can be for critical data sub sites. The scripts can be then ran as regular scheduled jobs.
  
• Sites with confidential data and heavy on content can be segregated as separate site collection and stored on a separate content databases with appropriate site quota templates applied.