Site per client

[#1]

I am considering Alfresco Cloud for my business and am looking at having a Site for each of our 1,000 odd clients into which any staff member can read and add documents.

Is there any limit to the number of sites able to be created in Alfresco Cloud?

Would this be the most logical way to structure the document repository where we could potentially share a site with clients and other external parties?

Can anyone share their experience implementing Alfresco Cloud in a professional services business like an law firm or accounting practice?

Thanks!

[#2]

I was advised by a cloud sales rep to create a different site for each client presumably so that external clients can be invited to each individual site.

However, I now have the issue where I want all my internal staff to have Collaborator access for each public site but I need to manually change their access level after they have joined each site.

There must be a better way, either automating the default access for certain users (groups of users) or by structuring with a single site but multiple client folders within that site.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[#3]

Further to my previous comments, we have made a slight change to our site structure. While we started with a separate site for each client, we have now changed to a separate site for each client group.

ClientA
- Correspondence
    - ClientA Letter1
    - ClientA Letter2
    - ClientA+B Letter1

ClientB
- Correspondence
    - ClientB Letter1
    - ClientB Letter2

As ClientA and ClientB are related, we now have

ClientA+B
- Correspondence
    - ClientA Letter1
    - ClientA Letter2
    - ClientA+B Letter1
    - ClientB Letter1
    - ClientB Letter2


This change has been made as we were finding too many sites with only a few documents and some documents were relevant to multiple clients within the same group. Any reduction in times to decide where to file or where to look is a benefit.

This makes sense for permissions too as there are fewer sites need to have permissions reviewed and in most cases, the individual clients within a group are generally privy to each others documents already.

Practically, if a client joins a group, we don't need to create a new site and redo the permissions. If a client leaves a group (vary rarely) it should be easy enough to move their files into their new site.

As some background, our previous system was simply a few shared network folders into which all clients files were stored. While this system was brilliant for saving and finding documents based on our naming scheme, it couldn't scale to the size we need and couldn't allow permissions to external parties.



Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.