Converting static site to Drupal 7 - How to set-up department sites? I am new to Drupal.  We have a corporate site that is static html, has 13 departments.  The template for the department sites are very similar to the main corporate site.  The departments will not have a different DNS assigned to it, that is, the structure will be as so:


main site URL:  www.mycorp.com  
department Site:  www.mycorp.com/hr


We would want the departments to update their own content. Each department has about 10 pages to maintain, but can grow. It is also important that all of the departments' content is  shared/accessed/searched by the main corporate site. Would Drupal 7 multisite set-up be recommended for this?
I think multisite is not the optimal solution for you. With a multisite installation, you will end up with completely separate sites that have their own content, categories, users, settings, user files etc. etc. In my experience, that is often too much separation for a site like yours.

For instance: With multisite, if one person needs to get access to two or more departments, you need to create a user account for him in each site. He will also need to login in every site. Another example: With multisite, it's not easy to take content from a department site and promote it to the main home page.

In your case, I would look into a solution built with Workbench and Workbench Access, or perhaps Domain Access. With those modules, you will end up with a system that is technically a single site, but where Drupal is configured to split the site into sections and control user permissions on a per-section basis.