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Denny
Denny

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Upcoming (Nov/Dec 2022) enforcement of limits for SharePoint lists & libraries in Site Collection

On Jul 26, 2022, MC405984 was published that states Microsoft will start enforcing hard limits on the number of list and libraries a site collection can have instead of just a recommendation as it is now. I have developed a SPFx solution (single page web part) for my company's legal department that provides a UI for managing contract metadata (across several lists), and creates a library for each revenue generating client as soon as they have documents to upload. We currently have over 20,000 clients, and nearly 20,000 libraries in the site collection (single site). We were forced to use this model instead of a single library because the requirements demand unique permissions which in a single library would exceed the existing rule of 5,000 maximum unique permission per library. The SPFx web part is extremely fast, and creates libraries quickly with no throttling. The user's experience within the site are limited to the SPFx web part app which has been thoughtfully created to avoid throttling-prone queries. The one place that is slow is the Site Contents page, but users are never using it because their entire experience is within the UI of my app. So my question: does this change have to happen? My app was developed in 2020 and at the time this was not a rule, but a suggestion that was part of the Listview Threshold guidance. I went out of my way to craft an app that would work given the limits in the SharePoint online platform because it's great for document storage, identity management and security. This rule enforcement will cripple my application. Since the reason for the rule is to improve user experience (which I have to imagine is affecting Site Contents mostly), I wonder if it would make more sense to find a way to work with the few sites that contain a large number of lists/libraries rather than hamstringing the platform. Perhaps there could be an administrative setting to allow a site to opt-in to have more than 2000 lists/libraries with the default that it is not allowed. That would give me and other developers/admins a viable path forward, and would also enforce the 2000 limit for all other sites by default.

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