We are currently investigating switching our CMS to Drupal (preferably 7). I have been playing around with it a bit and found several, half baked ways of achieving what I want, but it strikes me a more knowledgeable person might know the "right" way to do it.
We have a large content base in the region of 10-12,000 pages across our two main site, plus around 20 additional sites with smaller number of pages in the range of 5 - 100. We have a large author base of around 120 authors who have very specific areas within the site that they can edit, and these edits are then processed through a workflow to a group of 7 web managers to approve. Within the context of thsi requirement we need a way of driving one over-arching, large, quite deep, hierarchical structure, but keeping the experience as simple as possible for the authors so that its not possible for them to end up publishing items to the wrong places in sites.
The closest I can find to achieving this is to have several content types defined, one for each type of author and allow these content types to only publish to specific menus, and then somehow combine this large number of menus into one large menu system to drive the navigation.