Overview

This KB provides information on how you can overcome threshold limits in SharePoint whilst using Ideagen Mail Manager Enterprise Desktop Suite (Formerly OnePlace Mail Desktop and OnePlace Docs Desktop).

For performance reasons, there is a SharePoint view threshold limit of 5000 items enforced by Microsoft SharePoint. The SharePoint 5000 item limit threshold applies to the limit of items that are displayed in a given view. 

SharePoint Classic vs SharePoint Modern

The 5000-view limit affects the SharePoint Classic experience, which is used for COM add-ins, such as Ideagen Mail Manager Enterprise desktop. Scenarios where the List View Threshold limit has been exceeded, and viewed in SharePoint Online with the Modern Experience, will allow items to be displayed, without any error messages.

The purpose of this article is not to get around this SharePoint limit to allow you to surface more than 5000 items without any issue, as the limit is enforced for performance reasons but rather, to provide solutions that accomodate the limit and allow you to work with your Custom SharePoint views and access SharePoint locations and content successfully using OnePlaceMail Desktop & OnePlaceDocs Desktop.

Affects: 

The SharePoint view limit threshold applies to both SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises.

This can be surfaced in Ideagen OnePlaceMail Desktop and OnePlaceDocs Desktop

Issue

The 5000-item list view threshold limit in SharePoint is enforced by Microsoft to overcome performance issues when having to process and query a large number of items (an item being a File or Folder or Document Set).

This 5000-view limit affects the SharePoint Classic experience and unfortunately scenarios where the List View Threshold has been exceeded are only exclusively supported in the ‘modern’ browser experience in SharePoint. Whatever Microsoft can do in classic experience is what is available to tools like ours in API's. We do not have much control over the behavior in SharePoint unfortunately.   

When a SharePoint Document Library contains over 5000 items, users will run into a ‘Error loading folders’ error when loading the location in the navigation tree in the OnePlace Solutions Desktop products or our content view will revert to a basic ‘Explorer View’ in order to return the content (as opposed to in classic SharePoint in the browser where it becomes completely useable). This means that users will not be able to use their custom views if they exceed 5000 items.

When the threshold is exceeded, the user may receive the following message when browsing a location:

'Error loading files' in Navigation Tree if the Library/folder exceeds 5000 items

Error when browsing a location that exceeds 5000 items. The 'Explorer View' will be returned, which shows a basic view of the folder:

Resolution:

While there are some quick techniques available to improve the usability of a large library; things like creating custom filtered views (see further information below), limiting the number of items in a view, indexing columns; ultimately the best fool-proof way to avoid and mitigate the issue is too not put over 5000 files, folders and Document Sets into a single library.

It is generally recommended that if you are encountering List View Threshold issues, then your SharePoint data potentially could/should be split up further (eg, think multiple Document Libraries/Sites instead of folders) and/or the design of your SharePoint should be revisited. The use of Document Sets over the user of Folders is also a better way to organise content in a single Library.

Scenario: There are too many emails/documents at a single level:

• Option 1 : By creating a view in the affected Library named 'Content View", with a limit to return less than 5000 items, will allow OnePlaceMail/OnePlaceDocs to load the content without any issues. 
• Option 2: If you already have an alternative custom view in the library, with a custom name, please add this to your Configuration Profile so that this is the default view loaded when browsing. Further information can be found here: Configuration Settings (oneplacesolutions.com). The item to be modified via the Configuration Profile is: 'Custom content views' 

Scenario: There are too many items in the location; including Files/Folders/Document Sets:

By creating a view in the affected Library named 'Content View Navigation", this will allow OnePlaceMail/OnePlaceDocs to prsent a filtered view for Folders or Document Sets in the Navigation Tree. If the location exceeds 5000 folders or Document Sets, under the parent location being loaded.

Please also consider this message may occur in a scenario where there are a few subfolders or document sets, and one of those locations has over 5000 items. Creating the Content View Navigation view will overcome this scenario.

OnePlaceLive

OnePlaceLive’ allows you to simplify SharePoint further and deliver refined and personalised locations to users. If you have a Document library with over 5000 Folders or Document Sets, then the OnePlaceLive service can be utilised to help refine the number of these locations returned to users by ensuring that they are always relevant to what the users should have access to. OnePlaceLive achieves this by leveraging metadata and views in a central list of your locations, advanced SharePoint search queries and giving the administrator control over the locations that are deployed to each user or per department or business function.

 Further information:

• How to build a Legal Matter Management SharePoint solution on Microsoft 365 (oneplacesolutions.com)
• How to build a project management system on Microsoft 365 SharePoint (oneplacesolutions.com)

If you would like further information on how the OnePlaceLive service can help you further, please reach out to success at oneplacesolutions.com

Useful External Resources

• How to overcome SharePoint 5000 item limit threshold | Sharepoint Maven
• How to deal with large document libraries in SharePoint Online | SharePoint Maven
• SharePoint threshold error “The view cannot be displayed because it exceeds the list view threshold" (youtube.com)