How to handle very Large document (1000 of pages) in SharePoint

Steel Contributor

SharePoint Solution for very large documents

 

I know its a simple solution and I have presented to some of my customer, Just wanted to get your opinion that is there a better way to handle these large document with SharePoint?

 

Please feel free to comment on it , I would like to see if there are better option leveraging any other apps with in MS 365 

 

A slide from my Solution presentation.

TTT_Wiki1.jpg

When you have a large set of documents which are hundreds of thousands of pages, such as Product Manuals, corporate policies, Keying instructions files etc,...

Here are some customer use cases/ pain points with respect to handling large documents within their corporate content management space.

  • A single document which has several pages (1000+ pages)
  • Document that are edited or updated on a regular basis.
  • Versioning of the document continues to exist for audit and as a reference
  • Only particular pages of the document to be shared with particular users and not the whole document
  • External sharing & editing
  • Editing and referencing other child document references within a document 

In such cases it is not advisable or even feasible to keep these large files in One Drive or SharePoint library. Splitting the files into smaller chunks and uploading is not an option either.

One solution that I implemented for one of our clients is to transform these large documents into SharePoint Wiki pages and load them into Wiki libraries. SharePoint Wiki pages are widely used in organizations and easy to create,edit, share information and collaborate with others. They are very intuitive to create and use and thus easy for the users to adopt and maintain.

 

Solution diagram

 WikiMigration.jpg

 

Benefits of migrating to wiki pages:

  • Ability to edit and publish individual pages and not the whole document (that has 1000+ pages) every time a page is edited.
  • Minor versions and comments : Versions are created only for the edited pages and tracking the version is easy and color coded.
  • Table of contents & easy navigation to the pages: Relevant pages are grouped together through table of contents and quick link references to other related materials can be maintained
  • Embedding diagrams, reports, tables, lists, pictures and videos is easy. These can be simply loaded from the managed library.
  • Ability to save Page drafts and enforce approval process on publishing
  • Page rating and bookmarks
  • In-page metadata and intuitive search across pages

Summary:

Handling large electronic documents and other content can be cumbersome and time consuming for businesses, even though it is not as hard as maintaining a large volume of paper piles. SharePoint wiki pages and Enterprise Wiki sites are a simple yet effective solution that can address majority of these issues.

5 Replies
Good article! How do you perform this migration to wikipages?

Adam

I have the same question as @adam deltinger. Last time I tried to do something like this there were many limitation in the formatting of wiki pages, has that been improved?

How did I miss it :)..
I have used Word to Wiki Online app. its a nice tool .. we tried first and liked, the paid version is really good. Here is the link to the tool.
https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/office/WA104379573?tab=Overview

Ok! Thanks..I guess this will take some time for a large library  :)

Yes It is , just better than copy & pasting manually :) that was one issue what we faced.