Forum Discussion

Iron Contributor

Dec 14, 2018

Flat Document Libraries vs Folders

We are in the process of migrating from local shared drives to the online SharePoint Document Libraries. A lot of discussions are about should we create folder structure in the Document Library or no...

Iron Contributor

Dec 14, 2018

It's all about balance but first off I want to mention that SharePoint has a default limit of 5000 view threshold. This means that the entire view won't render if that view loads 5,000 items or more. If you are on-premises you can raise this limit but if you are moving to SharePoint Online you can't. If you are starting with 6,000 files, that will inevitably grow and you need to account for this.

Yes, I certainly agree to use fewer folders and metadata, but its a balance. Folders do have their place. You can't sort and filter by a folder, but you can set permissions and views by a folder. Think about the file lifecycle, are all 6,000 files ACTIVE, should there be an archive, etc. Sometimes, you create additional document libraries due to security reasons or to separate an archive. Folders are also used as an index in the library so this overcomes the 5,000 view limit and how a single library can support millions of files. I try to limit subfolders to 2 levels deep where possible.

Also, a tip when you do use folders is to show the child items and child folders columns so users will know at a glance if that folder has anything in it. This avoids the whole hunt and peck process.

Jon Skelton

Copper Contributor

Jul 16, 2021

Sorry about being late to the party, by three years; but I am doing some research to explain to users why they need to not continually break inheritance on folders, within folders, within folders, just to allow a particular set of users access to a set of files. (ya, I'm not joking) The top level site has reached the point where it is reaching its list view max of 5000.

One site collection has 15 sub-sites within their top level site collection. This is inline with their department and team structure. Rather than continually breaking inheritance, I've encouraged them to create a new Library for documents that require specific permissions. One fear would be that they start creating multiple Libraries that get lost in the clutter - as you spoke to above.

These users think of SharePoint as they think of a file share. Can you advise a way to help the users organize their documents into more managed structure?

Our standard is to use AD groups assigned to SharePoint groups to assign permissions; however, this site was create over a decade ago when there was no standard. Users are assigned through out. I just migrated the farm from SP 2010 to SP2019 last summer. I plan to build them a new Site with sub-site with our current standard.

Cheers