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My site contains around two hundred thousand (200,000) users , i am defining the users in sharepoint groups. But i came through some of the microsoft blogs , it says a sharepoint group can have only 5000 users per group. So how can i go ahead and solve this issue ? Also is it ok if i store all the two hundred thousand users in one group? My thinking was to creating a sp group with same permission progrmatically when a threshold limit of 5000 is reached . am i correct ? Also,i am not using user profile sync service , as the AD doesnt have defined proper groups.

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  • Well after long discussion , i have decided to add user to spgroup when a userlogins to my portal.if he logsout i will remove him from the group.Is there any kind of issue if i follow this approach?
    – Nikhil J
    Mar 9, 2012 at 6:51

3 Answers 3

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If your really need to give access to that amount of users, I would definately put those users in an AD group, and couple that group to the SharePoint groups.

when adding all those users separately, you will run into issues.

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  • Agreed! Use AD groups. Native SP groups are notoriously unwieldy.
    – Louis
    Feb 21, 2012 at 3:52
  • ya even i thought the same . can anybody tell me what will be the issues faced if i start storing users in spgroup ?
    – Nikhil J
    Feb 23, 2012 at 17:01
  • You will get severe performance issues when all users are added separetely. And then I don't even mention what happens when you are going to work with item level permissions in combination with those SPGroups ;)
    – Bas Lijten
    Feb 27, 2012 at 7:49
  • Well after long discussion , i have decided to add user to spgroup when a userlogins to my portal.if he logsout i will remove him from the group.Is there any kind of issue if i follow this approach?
    – Nikhil J
    Mar 9, 2012 at 6:52
  • Why are you doing that? Why not using AD groups or claims?
    – Bas Lijten
    Mar 9, 2012 at 8:48
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You will probably run into issues if you add 5000 users directly to a SharePoint group. Specifically, you could run into the 64K ACL limit. That issue manifests itself in many ways in SharePoint and one obvious manifestation is that the crawl stops working. See the following posts for guidance as to limits and best practices:

Best Practices for Enterprise User Scalability in SharePoint

The Filter Daemon Has Timed Out

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  • Well after long discussion , i have decided to add user to spgroup when a userlogins to my portal.if he logsout i will remove him from the group.Is there any kind of issue if i follow this approach?
    – Nikhil J
    Mar 9, 2012 at 6:52
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Here's an official info that supports your version:

SharePoint Server 2010 enables you to add users or Active Directory groups to a SharePoint group. Having up to 5,000 users (or Active Directory groups or users) in a SharePoint group provides acceptable performance. The activities most affected by this limit are as follows:

  • Fetching users to validate permissions. This operation takes incrementally longer with growth in number of users in a group.

  • Rendering the membership of the view. This operation will always require time.

I think it's right to split users into the different groups. Maybe it also be heplful to create nested groups - then you will have to assign permissions to the top group only - there's no risk to forget any group in that case while assigning permissions.

UPDATE: Unfortunately there's no support for nested groups in SharePoint so my last suggestion is not applicable.

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  • as far as i know there is no concept of nested groups in sharepoint
    – Nikhil J
    Feb 23, 2012 at 17:16
  • I can confirm that getsmiles. I just tried to do nested groups the other day and sharepoint gives you an error message specifically saying it's not supported. Feb 23, 2012 at 17:22
  • That's a shocking info for me - I allways thought that it's possible. But I've checked - yes, it's not supported. :(
    – Alex Boev
    Feb 23, 2012 at 17:31

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