We have a lot of clients. Our MSFT reseller made 26 libraries each filled with client files by last name (A, B, C). The problem is that many of these libraries are way over 5,000 files.
I don’t think we should further break this down into micro libraries (Aa-Ae, Af-Al, Am-As, At-Az, Ba-Be, etc.) because as we get more clients, each library is only going to grow, and we’ll constantly be shifting around alphabet breakdowns.
But given that we have 1,700 clients, I’m not sure we want a separate library for each client. That seems like it would be difficult to navigate.
Our reseller is no help. What do people do in this kind of situation?
Thank you!
Hi OP
Sounds like you need an Information Architecture overhaul! You haven’t said which version of SharePoint you are using so my reply assumes you are using SP 2013.
First of all – don’t worry about the 5000 item limit. SP libraries can hold 30,000,000 items. The 5000 item limit is the List View Threshold – here is a link to explain what that is https://en.share-gate.com/blog/demystifying-the-sharepoint-list-thresholds – you can get around this with views as long as you have your metadata sorted out.
Okay, BEFORE you change anything structurally, you need to look at the types of documents that are stored in the library – are there Contracts? Emails? Letters? Meeting Minutes? – go through the library and classify the types of documents that are used. Write them down under a heading called ‘Document Type’ or similar. Then get your list of Clients. In the Managed Metadata Term Store for the site – create two new Term Sets called ‘Document Type’ and ‘Client’ – add the terms in these term sets. Then go back to your library/s add these columns and update the metadata for all the items (yes it will be time consuming!). Obviously this is just a start, you can expand on that and add more columns that want to classify by (eg Year, Active/Inactive Customer etc etc). Once this is done, then you can turn on the Metadata Navigation filtering for the library so users can search for what they want to see; or else you can create custom views eg ‘All Contracts’ (filter where Document Type = Contract) or ‘All Client X Docs’ (filter where Client = X).
You may want to look at using Content Types later in the piece but that may be getting too complicated for you at this stage.
