Best practice organization of sites on Sharepoint Online?

Question

I'm trying out Office 365 for my company, as a sort of intranet/collaboration platform, and I was wondering what is the best practice for the information architecture of a Sharepoint site, with regards to the division of content into separate sites.

Here's a first draft:

Now, my questions are:

1. Should I divide the site into sub sites like this? This is loosely based on the access different user groups should have. But the problem is, some users should have access to all of these, and in that case it might just seem an inconvenience that they cannot search/filter/view all files from the same location. I.e. if I divide them like this I seem to cement a division of content/documents.
2. Or should I just dump more content into one site and use views and filters to get the categories below? But how do I then implement some sort of restriction on different parts? (Other than laboriously setting it on each document)
3. If I do divide it into these sub sites, is there any way to get aggregated views of it? I have read about the Content Query Web Part, but apparently that is not available in Office 365, at least not yet. Is there another way?

I would highly appreciate some help on these questions, and also some general pointers on the best practice of this type of site, so we don't "paint ourselves into a corner" so to speak...

EDIT:

Ok, so I got a couple of answers that suggest the Content Query Web Part should be available in Office 365, but I have no idea where. Here's the interface of the Content Rollup category, where I guess I should find it, but I don't see where that would be. The selected part is supposed to show sites of my choice, but is that it? I want to be able to show documents from various document libraries, but what would it mean to show entire sites...? Or is it somewhere else?

EDIT 2:

With the suggestions below, I'm close to getting the site aggregation to work for document libraries, which would sort of accomplish the flexibility I would like. The only problem now is I don't see any of the Managed metadata columns I have created in subsites from the top site where I'm creating a Content Query Web Part... Is there any way for such Managed metadata columns to be available here?

Answer 1

Do create subsites, the structure you have looks good. You get lots of benefits from separate sites, such as permissions, retention, social following of what's new within a site (in the new version). You can aggregate content using CQWP or SRWP, as mentioned. However, when using CQWP, be careful with how much data the web part needs to query in order to get all content.

You can kill the page where the web part is if you make a query that goes through all sites in the site collection to get "Latest X documents". For large queries, use SRWP.

You can build search/filter/view all using Search results web part and Refinement panel.

Answer 2

The Content Query WebPart is available in Office 365. You probably mean the Content Search Web Part, which is not yet available, but there is an alternative for that in the Search Results Web Part.

For your scenario, I think the Content Query Web Part for aggregation should suffice.

You can also use search for aggregation but currently we are facing a lot of problems with the crawl timings in Office 365 (2013). This should get better in the future I hope.

Answer 3

A key consideration should be design for scalability... in particular with regard to amount of content to be stored

A SP - site collection has a suggested maximum size of 100-200GB.

For more details refer to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc262787.aspx#SiteCollection