SharePoint/SharePoint Online Limits You Should Know

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Microsoft SharePoint represents a modern platform that provides comprehensive solutions for collaboration and content management, marking a departure from conventional file servers. It revolutionizes data organization, administration, and sharing, setting new standards in these areas.

If you’re a newcomer to SharePoint and don’t have to transfer a substantial amount of data from other platforms, you don’t need to be overly concerned about SharePoint’s built-in constraints and limitations. You’ll become familiar with these limitations as you work with SharePoint, and they won’t pose significant obstacles. However, if you’re in the process of migrating a large amount of data from your current platform to SharePoint, it’s essential to be well-informed about SharePoint’s limitations and restrictions to prevent any significant challenges during the migration process.

SharePoint Limits by Plan

SharePoint imposes certain limits that are contingent solely on the subscription plan you’ve selected. Let’s examine the various currently offered plans and their respective limitations:

The boundaries depicted earlier are contingent solely on the subscription plans you’ve acquired. However, there exist certain SharePoint limitations that are universally applicable across all subscription plans. These will be elaborated upon in the subsequent section.

• SharePoint Service limits applicable to all SharePoint plans
  A SharePoint list has the capacity to accommodate up to 30 million items, and a document library can also hold 30 million files or folders. Nevertheless, once the combined count of items, files, or folders surpasses 100,000, handling permissions becomes notably intricate. Therefore, it is advisable to minimize the use of unique permissions for extensive lists whenever feasible.
• File size
  250 GB is the maximum file size permitted for SharePoint upload. Also, you can share only 50,000 items within a folder or subfolders.
• Moving/Copying limits
  There are certain constraints when it comes to moving or copying multiple files in SharePoint. You cannot move more than 30,000 files at once, and each individual file must be smaller than 15 GB. Additionally, the combined total file size should not exceed 100 GB.
• Sync limits
  These restrictions apply to SharePoint Online. Within a single team site library or OneDrive, SharePoint Online has the capacity to accommodate 30 million documents. However, synchronizing all of these items simultaneously can potentially lead to performance challenges. Therefore, it is advisable to limit storage and synchronization to a maximum of 300,000 files within a single folder or library. Additionally, if your files are distributed across multiple libraries, it is recommended not to attempt syncing such a large number of files.

  Note: All these limits are even lesser for some previous SharePoint versions.

• Limits on Versions

  For major versions, the SharePoint limit is 50,000, and for minor versions, it is 511.

• Limits on SharePoint groups
  In SharePoint, you can have a maximum of 10,000 groups per site or site collection, with each group accommodating up to 5,000 users. Additionally, each user is limited to being a member of a maximum of 5,000 groups.
• Managed metadata limits
  Managed metadata has several restrictions, encompassing both global and site-level terms. These limitations include a maximum of 1 million total terms, 2 million term labels, and 1 million term properties. Additionally, the system permits up to 1,000 global groups and 1,000 global term sites.
• Site metadata
  The overall site metadata has a limit of 1000 GB per site. This is fairly a high value as site metadata usually does not reach this value.
• Subsite limits
  The number of allowed sub-sites is 2000 per site (site collection).
• Hosted applications
  SharePoint supports 20,000 instances of hosted applications per organization.
• Number of users
  The user limit on SharePoint per site collection is 2 million.

It is crucial to grasp the SharePoint limitations when transferring data from platforms such as File Server or Google Drive to OneDrive for Business or SharePoint. Failure to align the migration data with SharePoint’s restrictions can result in unforeseen obstacles, potentially leading to migration failures or protracted completion times.

Numerous top-tier SharePoint Migration tools, such as Kernel Migration for SharePoint, offer a valuable capability known as the Migration Analyzer. This tool diligently examines the data slated for migration and assesses whether it exceeds the boundaries of the SharePoint environment. In cases of inconsistencies, it adeptly identifies and highlights potential migration issues, allowing users to address them proactively before commencing the actual migration process. The Migration Analyzer within Kernel Migration for SharePoint stands as a robust feature, significantly streamlining the migration process by saving both time and effort. Presented below is a sample SharePoint Migration Analysis Report generated by Kernel Migration for SharePoint.

Conclusion

Microsoft SharePoint encompasses numerous boundaries and constraints that necessitate user awareness. Transitioning to the SharePoint platform can result in chaos without prior knowledge of these limitations. Therefore, we’ve compiled a list of these limitations for your reference. Utilizing a proficient SharePoint migration tool equipped with the Migration Analyzer feature enables you to assess your data’s compatibility with SharePoint’s limitations, helping you preemptively mitigate significant obstacles during the actual migration process.