CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am trying to figure out how to setup CiviCRM to support an organization that has multiple affiliates in different regions of the US and around the world. Ideally they would share the same web interface and features but have their own set of contacts and activity "silo'ed". The Global office (super admin) will be able to see all contacts and activity and centrally manage CiviCRM upgrades, updates and enhancements.

There would be some shared configuration and some specific to each affiliate.

• Some Global Profiles, Some affiliate specific profiles.
• Some Global Custom Fields, some affiliate specific custom fields.
• Affiliate specific Email Templates. Can't see other affiliates Sent emails
• Affiliates can manage their own users (Can add a user to their own org/group only)
• Affiliates can see and manage only their own Campaigns. Cannot see other affiliate's campaigns.

The core features we would be using are:

• Donation management
• CiviMail
• Surveys (Phone Bank and Walklists)
• Campaigns

Looking at the multi-site setup it seems that multiple Drupal installations are necessary. Ideally we wouldn't need separate websites, subdomains or Drupal installations.
Each of these groups would have their own unique websites anyway and would only use CiviCRM for admin and volunteer users (no public facing pages used).

Questions
Is Multi-site the way to go? If not what is the alternative to managing multiple installation of CiviCRM?
If multi-site will work can it be done with only one Drupal installation?

Yes. I should have mentioned that I have read through (I think) everything on the Wiki (many times) and many things in the forums regarding multi-site issues. I've also setup a test environment to try out some of these scenarios.
Also, as an FYI I/we are an experienced Drupal development shop.
It is just a bit to wrap my head around and some things seems unclear.

Maybe it would be good to ask some questions based on that Wiki article.
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=47711051

1. Is the Multisite module needed for CiviCRM 4.x. I didn't try to install it because it is labeled as a Drupal 6.x in the .info file.

2. Is is really required to have 12 Drupal installations in order to have 12 Organizations add to CiviCRM? It seems that http://drupal.org/project/domain might solve this. Is this true? Is there any way around needing separate URLs for each org?

3. The "Functional Separation" matrix seems to indicate that this feature might be close to supporting what I need. However it indicates that, Surveys, Campaigns and Profiles don't have any separation. Is there any reasonable way around this with custom code?
(An ugly alternative I thought about was to ask users to pre-fix the names of these elements with their region name or something.)

4. If Multi-site doesn't work out....  Is there an tricks or efficient ways to maintain separate installations.

from a high level description, seems like your affliates are quite independent of each other, but have a base starting point

Might make it a lot easier to manage and maintain multiple independent sites. You can use drupal tools like drush and aegir to manage and deploy multiple sites

However u'll need to solve the central office issues and figure out what they need and how best to provide it

lobo