Team site or Communication site - Opinions wanted....

Question

I am currently setting up an intranet within our company using SharePoint. I have started to structure it like this.

1. Landing page (homepage) Communications site (hub). - This site will host news, announcements, important pages and quick links which the full company and all employees will have access too. (read only).
2. I now need to create department sites. These will be sites that will be for example, Operations, Health & Safety, Finance, Commercial etc.

This is where I am unsure. Should I use a team site or communications. For these sites I would like to create the main landing page and within this will be similar to the main hub site in terms of news, announcements etc but specific to the team / Department. Also in the site will be a document library that operations personnel can access and edit. I would also like the ability to be able to invite users outside of the department including guests to edit certain documents, is this possible?

I would also like to be able to authorise other departments to view other department sites / pages.

For example,

I would like Operations to be able to operate their site, I would like them to be able to view the website of Commercial for instance. We may have a document within the operations site that we want commercial to update.

Based on the above, which type of site would be best for the departments and would I be able to do what I have said?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

@nparsons75

Based on your description, I suggest you create a team site to share and collaborate between users.

In a team site, you could create a document library to store files. To share files with users outside of the team site including guests, you should enable external sharing at both tenant and site level.

References:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/external-sharing-overview
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/turn-external-sharing-on-or-off

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