Can any of you please recommend a good resource on planning a SharePoint site (book, website, or video)? I don't need the technical details of how to add pages and file libraries, but how to wisely plan the site.

Most of the scenarios that I find on the web are project oriented: they create a site for a specific project. Instead, I was thinking about creating a different sub site (tab) for each major "department" in our company (Sales and Marketing, Production, R&D, etc.) and have a document library in each site. However, in this scenario, some of the document libraries could be fairly complex. In particular, we have a few hundred components that we need to manage and have multiple files associated with each of them (Word documents, CAD files, PDFs, etc. each of which has a version history). Because we are still a very small company I would like to stay away from very expensive solutions like Autodesk Vault, but I still need to efficiently manage these files and their relative part numbers. Putting everything in a single document library and using an independent database to manage part numbers would not improve much on our current setup, but attaching the files to a SharePoint list sounds like a bad idea to me.

Another approach could be to set up a different site/tab for each "department", but then still work on different "project" sites for each active project. When a project is done, its key information could be archived in the respective "department" site/tab. This would probably simplify some permissions management (the "deparment" sites would have read only permission for most of the employees while the "project" sites would be visible only to a few selected members). However this aproach would not solve the "components" library issue and would probably make it more complicated because one would create the part in one site and store it in another.

Any suggestion is appreciated. Thanks.

I'd also recommend looking for any resources by the SharePoint MVP's.  Andrew Connel's blog might be a good starting point.

It sounds like what you're looking for in general is the team sites functionality along with some central part management.  I'd read a little on the team sites feature and see if it will meet your needs.

Hope that helps, and feel free to ask more questions!

-Jeremy

"Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Bible" seems a little too in depth for my need at the moment.