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Timothy O'Connor 1Timothy O'Connor 1 

Parent Organization with Smaller Child Organizations

My parent company is sharing a single Salesforce.com organization amongst a large number of smaller sub-companies. Most of what they are using is straight out of the box. When modest changes are proposed, for example to add a new field to the Opprtunities application, that proposal is reviewed and approved by a "Salesforce Administrator" within each of the sub companies. This makes sense since the transparency that sharing accounts, leads and opportunites across the entire larger organization brings is desirable. However, some of the smaller sub-companies now wish to begin developing custom applications, and it would not be desirable to share those applications across the entire larger organization. Each sub company has concerns with having their own development, test and UAT sandboxes as well. Is there a model for this type of situation?
SonamSonam (Salesforce Developers) 
The access to the custom applications on Salesforce can be restricted using the Profile of these users in the sub companies - you can check the link below to read further on this:
https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewHelpDoc?id=permissions_about_users_access.htm&language=en_US
Timothy O'Connor 1Timothy O'Connor 1
Thank you for your response. I am seeing a much larger problem than user permissions. In the case of my parent company, there are 40 sub-companies. Assuming five or six of these sub-companies wish to do custom development in Salesforce.com, is there a way to isolate these development teams from one another? We must not be the only company with this type of problem.
asagarwal.comasagarwal.com

You can isolate the development teams from one another by creating different sandbox for different development teams. However, you will then need to have one sandbox where all the different development work is combined to ensure that there are no conflicts and tested to ensure that everything works fine. You may also want to consider a Continuous Integration (CI) server to help you achieve the same.

Check out this URL on Salesforce Development Lifecycle that is an excellent document to how to manage the development lifecycle in different scenarios - http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/dev_lifecycle/salesforce_development_lifecycle.pdf