My organization currently has a few basic teams sites in o365 and we are about to take on many (potentially dozens) of new projects/programs that will all run a very similar course. Each project will have a consistent set of milestones and sub tasks for each milestone, and we'll also need some sort of "list" that will flag important issues that need to be addressed. Along with having a separate area for each project we'll need a high level dashboard showing where each project is on is milestone track and also highlighting how many issues have been entered into the list I mentioned above.
We'll have users that can access only one project and others that will access all projects and dashboard.
I'm relatively new to sharepoint but I'm thinking we will create a site collection with the top level site being the dashboard and then create identical sites, using a site template, for each project. Each project will contain additional lists to those mentioned above as well as a celendar etc.
Questions:
Is the architecture I just laid out the best considering requirements?
Are we best off building something like this from scratch in SP or using one of the free or purchasable SP apps and then modifying it to our needs?
Will it be easy to pull the milestone data from each project/site into a high level dashboard gantt chart?
Ditto with a simple report that would sum() the number of items in the issues list I mentioned?
Thanks for your help!