I'm currently in the midst of trying to convince an early adopter not to go crazy with multiple subspaces based on the org chart. This person is convinced that giving them "their own space" will somehow increase adoption.

Something that would look like

Root space

     Cross functional topic 1

          Div space 1

          Div space 2

          Div space 3

          Div space 4

     Cross functional topic 2

          Div space 1

          Nightmare continues....

This early adopters perspective is based on well founded experiences with a organizational culture that is in fact organized into separate semi-autonomous divisions, so it is not without merit. BUT, I know that simply creating subspaces under subspaces to give very small groups of "their own space" will lead to increased fragmentation with a lot of "ghost town spaces" with a few documents and a few discussions and a limited audience. Not to mention the fact that someone searching, while able to take advantage of powerful search features, will still leave people searching in multiple locations, and constantly deciding what subspace a document or discussion should be posted in, when in fact, the intent is to focus on the cross functional dimension.

It is inherently obvious to me that getting below 2 or 3 levels of spaces is going have a detrimental effect on cross division collaboration. Using tags, filters, and other features of Jive, I know that the divisions can coexist at the cross functional level.  So, are there any best practices, lessons learned, links, magic words, I can use?

P.S. - we've already been over the whole Groups thing. People are intent on treating different segments of the audience differently which makes Groups an unattractive choice in this situation.

Thanks,

Jon