What are the workaround if our SharePoint list might contain more than 5,000 items which have unique permissions

Question

We have a custom list which contain 4 levels of approvals as follow:-

1. Team Lead

2. Manager

3. Area Manager

4. Senior Manager

and the item will have unique permission on each stage. for example when it is Assigned to the Area Manager >> only the related area manager can edit while others can read-only. and once the senior manager approve the item >> its status will be closed and will have read-only to all users.

now our list sooner or later will reach the 5,000 unique items limit mentioned on this link https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/sharepoint-online-service-description/sharepoint-online-limits#unique-security-scopes-per-list-or-library .. Can anyone advice how we can handle this?

Thanks

Answer 1

I've set up something before where documents that were in the approval process were in one library, where they had unique permissions, and then after receiving final approval (or final un-approval), they get moved to an "approved" library where permissions were set at the library level and the items were reset to inherit from the parent (library).

That way you can have items that are "in process" have unique permissions and not get close to the security scope limit, and once items are done and "archived" you can let them build up in numbers but revert to inheriting permissions, again avoiding the security scope limit.