SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Organizing Documents

Now that we have an understanding of how documents are uploaded into a document library, let's take a look at organizing these documents. Even though document libraries are designed to hold a large amount of documents, there are still some considerations to note. Limiting the number of documents in a document library is critical in keeping a friendly user experience. The limit that Microsoft has set is a hard limit of no more than 2,000 files per folder; the same goes for the root of the document library, with a limit of 2,000 files. Having more than 10,000 documents in a library will at best provide an unfriendly user experience, with varied performance depending on the pure size of the documents. Organizing these files in an effective and efficient manner that allows users to find what they are looking for in document libraries of this size can become very challenging.

This brings up another consideration about using folders within a document library. Users who are unfamiliar with document libraries and the search engine in MOSS 2007 will create folders within document libraries. Organizing using folders is what they are used to, since organizing file shares is most likely what they were using before document libraries. Document libraries are not meant to be a complete replacement for file shares. File shares should continue to have their place in an organization. Don't get me wrong; live documents that are constantly under revision should live in a document ...