Have to agree.

I have a tree structure which maps Organisation, Region and office/branch.

The business requirement was that users only see "their" information, because it was deemed that they were too stupid to be able to navigate a three tier folder tree.

This means that local staff mapped to the office share, regional managers to the region share so that they can see all of their depots, and Divisional manager mapped to the top level.

This has been an administrative nightmare, and I'm doing stealth changes to move everyone to the top of the tree and use application path settings to access files at the right level.

Much simpler, much less hassle and sooo much easier when the branches get re-organised.

So, stick to a single share, use file/directory permissions to control access and set the paths for applications on the fly at login.