SharePoint online doclib limitations

Question

We did a first document management POC on Office 365 for one of our customers. This POC is composed of one document library containing PDF files (less than 1 MB for each file) and set of SharePoint lists connected to each others with lookup columns.

At the origin of this POC, no performance requirement was set. Now, our customer has defined a performance requirement for supporting 100 000 documents, thus: - around 100 GB of documents in the same library - a maximum of 500 000 items in sharepoint lists.

I know that for an "On Premise" SP2013 instance, this can be supported: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787(v=office…

But, what about Office 365? I saw in this MSDN article that the O365 boundaries are much more restrictive. For instance, regarding the site collection storage limit, a boundary of 5,000 items in site libraries, including files and folders is specified. This does not match at all our performance expectations. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/SharePoint-Online-s…

What are your suggestions for supporting such performance requirements in O365 ?

Thanks for your help,

Answer 1

5,000 items is a view threshold. List view threshold is the maximum rows a single SQL command can read.
That means that you cannot view more than 5,000 items but you will be able to add many more. The biggest list I am using in my SharePoint Online tenant is with 17,000 items.

In order to make the list or library (library is a type of list) work, limit the view. For that purpose you can use:

• Managed Metadata column
• index column
• filtered views
• organize items into folders

Managing large lists Microsoft article

List with > 5000 items working with Paging?

Microsoft, however, doesn't guarantee correct behaviour of a list exceeding 5,000 items and if you should need their help with any issue that may occur in such a list, you will be asked to reduce its item count below 5,000.
Issues that you may experience
So test first the behaviour of such list before you go ahead with the production.