Large Document Library

Question

Looking for advice!

I work for a small-scale consulting business (<25 employees), but a good portion of what we do results in quite a lot of documentation to file and this results in all of our 150 projects (for 80+ clients) we do in a year having multiple projects, each with 50+ documents each (and in addition, many of our projects recur annually).

We have recently been moving to SharePoint, albeit slowly, but we are not SharePoint experts by any means; a few of us know enough to use the basic features - document libraries, team sites, communication sites, basic site editing, etc.

We are a bit stumped as to how we should structure our client files since we will have 10's of thousands files/folders, here is the current state:

Internal Project Team Site

-> Document Library

     **->  Client A (Folder)**

             - Project Document Set 1  
               Project Document Set 2  
               Project Document Set 3   
              \*(1 doc set per client project, some done by different departments within our org. All tagged with metadata - year, project type, department, client name, etc.)

We have already received the "too many list items" error. So, here is and they may be silly questions, but:

1. I know you can have multiple document libraries for a SharePoint site, is there a recommended maximum amount?
   (My wondering - would it make sense for each client to be its own document library?)
2. Is there a limit on the number of items per document library on a site, or is the maximum referring to the site itself, regardless of how many document libraries there are? What is that max? eg. 5000 list max? - is this 5000 list items/files or the actual list itself?
3. Is there a better way for us to manage our client and project folders?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can give us some advice. We aren't looking to do all sorts of fancy things with SharePoint yet, we just want our Client/Project documents to be migrated to SharePoint for online access (yes, we are a bit behind!).

Answer 1

Dear respected BCQuestion,

Good day! Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community. We are happy to help you.

As per your description, it seems that your current structure is a main document library with client folders.

While it may be tempting to create a separate document library for each client, this approach could quickly become unmanageable as you may exceed SharePoint's limits on libraries or run into performance issues. Instead, consider creating:

If your projects can be categorized, create separate libraries for each project type. This helps to reduce the number of items in any single library while still allowing easy access.

SharePoint lists and libraries have a threshold limit of 30,000,000 items, but you will encounter significant performance issues once you exceed 5,000 items in a view without proper indexing or filtering. This means that for practical purposes, you should try to keep the number of items in a single view under 5,000. For your reference: SharePoint limits - Service Descriptions

There is no strict maximum on the number of libraries you can create in a SharePoint site; however, performance can degrade when there are too many libraries or when the libraries themselves contain too many items.

Conclusion:

Yes, creating a separate document library for each client can be a good approach. This helps in organizing files, setting unique permissions, and managing metadata more effectively. It also avoids hitting the 5,000-item threshold in a single library.

Please understand that our initial reply may not always immediately resolve the issue. However, with your help and more detailed information, we can work together to find a solution.

Appreciate your patience and understanding and thank you for your time and cooperation.

Sincerely,

Waqas Muhammad

Answer 2

Hi BCQuestion,

I appreciate your kind words.

You are welcome:). In this case, if you think my provided idea is helpful and you can understand my explanation and correct direction on this whole scenario, if possible, could you please use the feedback tool to send us feedback? (photo below).

Your feedback really means a lot to the dedicated members of our community.

If there are any issues with Office apps in the future, feel free to post to this community again.

We will be there to help you.

Have a great day and stay safe 😊

Sincerely

Waqas Muhammad

Answer 3

Thank you! These explanations helped a lot.