How maximum number of permissions is calculated in SharePoint Online?

Alexandre 20 Reputation points
2023-05-26T15:45:18.57+00:00

Hi Community!

I am currently building an integration between Dynamics 365 and SPO for managing documents.

As I would like to handle custom permissions on folders, I come with few questions after reading Microsoft documentation:

Then, considering this, I am wondering how the 5'000 recommendation is calculated?

Let's take an example based on this folder structure:

  • Account1 (folder inherits permission from library)
    • Opportunity1 (folder with unique permissions)
      • Document1 (inherits permissions from Opportunity1)
      • Document2 (inherits permissions from Opportunity1)
    • Opportunity2 (folder with unique permissions)
      • Document3 (inherits permissions from Opportunity2)
      • Document4 (inherits permissions from Opportunity2)

Do we consider that only 2 items are in the 5'000 recommendation (meaning that I can define 4'998 more items with custom permissions)? Or, because documents are inside folders with unique permission they are taken into account for this recommendation (meaning that I can define 4'994 more items with custom permissions)?

Hope that it's clear and thanks a lot for your help!

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Accepted answer
  1. Ling Zhou_MSFT 12,335 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor
    2023-05-29T05:05:31.9766667+00:00

    Hi @Alexandre,

    As we know, a List or a Library can contain 50,000 items with unique permissions, but the recommended limit is 5,000. If you apply unique permissions on a folder, and the documents in this folder have same permissions as parent folder, SharePoint will treat as one unique permission. So for your example, you have 2 items have unique permissions (Opportunity1 and Opportunity2), you can define 4'998 items with custom permissions.

    enter image description here

    Reference (from "Resource throttles and limits" section):

    Manage large lists and libraries - Microsoft Support


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