SharePoint Best Practices / Enterprise team/collaboration

Question

Hello all,
So I consider myself an expert in SP. I have quite a project ahead of me and am trying to work through the best possible way to move forward. Long story made short: we have 'team sites' that are pretty much solely for department usage. However, our organization
often crosses department boundaries with collaboration efforts that while one department may own, have a need to pull in various staff members to the efforts. Much of these efforts are either continual or recurring. In hopes to not have a million separate
sites, (ok so not a million but too many) am trying to plan out the architecture for our inside SP to look something like this: Intranet (root) -> Committees (sub) -> Committee 1 {etc} (sub sub)Teamsites (sub) -> Dept 1 {etc} (sub sub) 
Ok so with this: in many cases (let's say IT) we have documents (instruction guides) that would be enterprise purposed. There is also information that is for IT only. So my thoughts was to make the top level team site the "enterprise read' site, then
if there was content that was for IT only it would be secured via document library or a sub site of the main team site. (I prefer the later as I think it is cleaner).
I have researched this and have read everything from 'do not use team sites' to pretty much be convinced there is no standard way to support both an enterprise collaboration / departmental use for SharePoint. I am very much about clean architecture and do
NOT want SP to be a mess (which if not done correctly it will be). I am also about business process. I want it to SUPPORT the business and not be a hindrance to getting work done.
Any thoughts to this would be fantastic as I really want to see who else is using it in this way and what you have done, works well, does not work well, etc.

Answer 1

Only some tips, never collaborated with someone else, being the solo teacher. You didn't mention which version you are using, what I write here is meant for CP7.
Be sure to prepare a theme and/or a template that will be used by everyone. A theme consists of master slides, object styles, skin editor. Master slides can have custom navigation shape buttons.  In a template you can eventually also prepare different slides with placeholders, and eventually advanced actions etc. For CP6 and earlier that is the only way to reuse advanced actions, in Captivate 7 you can export shared actions that can be imported in any project for reuse.
A feature that few users know about are the external libraries. You can open the library of any project as an external library in another project. That is a good idea to store assets that you want to use in different projects: images, audio clips, video clips, eventually equations. The shared actions in a library can not (yet?) be used in another project however.
If you are on CP7 you have automatically the roundtripping with source Adobe Photoshop files and source Audition files, both from CC. That can also make collaboration lot easier if those assets are prepared in those applications. Will not expand on that, because I'm not sure you have the Creative Cloud applications.
Those are my two cents.
Lilybiri