SharePoint single "document library" vs. "folders"
The SharePoint developers in my group seem to be going toward creating single document libraries for sites (and putting hundreds of documents of all types, Word, Excel, PDF in each) - and then "virtually" segregating and displaying the documents using custom views and filters - rather than creating individual document library folders for various document types (processes, procedures, policies, for example).
Is there any insight you can provide with respect to response time or any other user-facing impact (or on the system itself) by doing it this way (doc files in a single library) - in favor of using the "folder" scenario?
Thanks!
Answers
- Hi Cyndi,theoretically the number of document you can put into a document library are several millions (if I remember correctly) but per view you should limit it to a maximum of 2000 if you want good performance.As we don't want a SharePoint document library to be a new version of a classic file share, the documents will now be differentiated by their content types. I recently did a small test where I wrote a small program to insert 50.000 items in a custom list. This gave no performance issues when using views on this list containing less then 2000 items.Greets,Frank
- Marked As Answer byGuYumingMSFT, ModeratorThursday, October 22, 2009 7:33 AM
All Replies
- Most old hands prefer to use Views and several document libraries (maybe even several sites).
Provided you make sure that what is being presented to the user isn't the full set of documents (when that full set is very large) in the document library then views aren't a major impact.
Folders are often used by newbies who simply mass transfer entire file structures from the file system to a single document library with folders with the same names as the directories in the file system. It's a quick but very dirty way of getting things into SharePoint and uses none of SP's strengths.
Your people are right !
(In addition there have always been oddities with the way folders are implemented which will give you more user queries (sort and search especially))
WSS FAQ sites: http://wssv2faq.mindsharp.com and http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com
Total list of WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 Books (including foreign language) http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/V%20Books.aspx - Hi Cyndi,theoretically the number of document you can put into a document library are several millions (if I remember correctly) but per view you should limit it to a maximum of 2000 if you want good performance.As we don't want a SharePoint document library to be a new version of a classic file share, the documents will now be differentiated by their content types. I recently did a small test where I wrote a small program to insert 50.000 items in a custom list. This gave no performance issues when using views on this list containing less then 2000 items.Greets,Frank
- Marked As Answer byGuYumingMSFT, ModeratorThursday, October 22, 2009 7:33 AM
Please see what follows taken as excerpt from: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/07/25/scaling-large-lists.aspx
You may be able to manage larger lists to some extent by using views within Office SharePoint Server 2007 that are filtered such that there are never more than 2,000 items returned. Filtered views provide better performance than just trying to view one large flat list, but are not as efficient as breaking down the list into different containers if you are using the predefined browser-based Office SharePoint Server 2007 interface.
