When we set up the portal for my current client we decided that all departments were to get a wss site to store documents etc. These site were also accessible to colleagues from other departments. If you set the rights correctly there is nothing really wrong with this set-up. However, the problem we've experienced is that employees from other departments get to see options in which they are not interested and probably will not have access to anyway.
Then it occurred to me that using area's to store information about a department for employees outside the department is a good solution. Every department now gets an area besiedes their existing wss site. In the area they define what other users can see. The wss site is used for internal collaboration only. If they have documents that are meant to see by the organisation they can publish it to the portal from their wss site or place it in the area itself. The only thing I have to figure out is how I can set the rights so that some documents in a document library can be accessed everyone and other's can't. I've got a feeling that this will not possible and that I have to create a seperate library for this. Not ideal but it will work. Suggestions are welcome.
Today I decided to create a new area in a Sharepoint portal. I then decided that I wanted to customize the resulting page.
What I failed to notice is that the area was created from a default template. After making some changes to this area I noticed that other area's now looked like my new area.
We have choosen to let new area's inherit from a template so that we do not have to modify all templates if we make a change. The only thing you have to remember then is to break the inheritance before customizing a particular area.