Building Site Collections in SharePoint Online

Question

Hello all,
Please forgive me for this very basic question, but I was not able to find the info online. 
Background info: I have a great deal of experience with SharePoint administration on-prem but not much experience with SharePoint Online. My current organization has O365 and wants to build a collaboration environment and an Intranet. I understand the information
architecture practices that would have been common for this for an on-prem environment, and I understand that those have changed with 2013 and SharePoint Online due to the new practice of organizing everything under one web app. 
Between reading some articles and using my experience with on-prem, I am trying to design an organized information architecture that will facilitate both environments and the permissions structures they require. My tentative plan was to build one site collection
for the Intranet under https://mycompany.sharepoint.com/sites (under which subsites would be built for various Intranet divisions), and then a number of individual site collections for the collaboration environment under https://mycompany.sharepoint.com/teams
(/hr, /finance, etc., so that content owners and users could work in their own site collection without affecting a site collection belonging to someone else). 
This is the article that initially caused me to believe that this is possible/a good idea: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/richard_dizeregas_blog/archive/2014/09/01/sharepoint-online-information-architecture-considerations.aspx. 
"For [managed paths] you get the root, /search (explicit managed path), /sites (wildcard managed path), and /teams (wildcard managed path)."
However this article leads me to believe that I will not be allowed to create any site collections at all, only subsites: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Plan-sites-and-manage-users-8e568d8d-3d65-42c4-99fa-f7285c9db842. 
"You cannot create additional site collections in SharePoint Online for Office 365 for Small Business."
I understand the answer to this may depend on what version of O365 we have, and I am working to find that out. 
My understanding is that I cannot be made a SharePoint Online administrator without being a global O365 administrator: http://blogs.technet.com/b/lystavlen/archive/2012/06/14/understanding-the-administrator-role-in-sharepoint-online.aspx.
"You cannot separate the roles of Office 365 global administrator and SharePoint Online Administrator." 
Thus, I don't currently have the level of access I need to browse around the administration area and find the answers to my questions that way. When the time comes, I will likely be given temporary access or will be working with an O365 global administrator
to build.
Main question: Will I be allowed to build site collections under managed paths?
Larger question: How are others managing the information architecture for an Intranet and a Collaboration environment in SharePoint Online, especially if the answer to the prior question is no?
Thanks in advance for any insight you can offer. 
Shae

Answer 1

Hi,
According to the error message, the Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.Client.Tenant.dll seems not been loaded.
You can find it in the path below:
C:\Program Files\SharePoint Client Components\Assemblies
A code snippet about how to retrieve a list of site collections in a tenant for your reference:
const string username = "[email protected]";
const string password = "password";
const string tenantAdminUrl = "https://yourdomain-admin.sharepoint.com/";
var securedPassword = new SecureString();
foreach (var c in password.ToCharArray()) securedPassword.AppendChar(c);
var credentials = new SharePointOnlineCredentials(username, securedPassword);
using (var context = new ClientContext(tenantAdminUrl))
context.Credentials = credentials;
var tenant = new Tenant(context);
SPOSitePropertiesEnumerable spp = tenant.GetSiteProperties(0, true);
context.Load(spp);
context.ExecuteQuery();
foreach (SiteProperties sp in spp)
Console.WriteLine(sp.Title);
Best regards,
Patrick
Patrick Liang
TechNet Community Support