Organising large Doc volumes in Sharepoint

Question

I need to upload into Sharepoint around 100,000 (MS-Word) documents that are currently on a file server - added over the past 7 years. I've read that a sharepoint Document Library should really be limited to 2,000 documents, and that there are performance issues once this is exceeded.

I've thought about creating a Doc Library for each calendar year, but even so, there would still be well over 10,000 Docs in each one...

I read that creating Views on the Doc Libraries would increase performance, but I don't see how this would be. What about adding Indexes??

What's the best solution? Anyone come across this issue?

Answer 1

I think the problem isn't necessarily with having thousands of documents in a library, just thousands of documents in a view - if you have your views set up to sort by month, you might be OK.

EDIT: Per Vinny's answer, you should be alright unless someone tries to view everything at once. Simple solution: don't let them :)

Answer 2

The soft limit is 2000 per view. The current document library limit for "acceptable performance" is (God help anyone if they get to this): 5 million per library:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287790.aspx

Maybe a library per year with a folder (yeah, I know, folders are bad) for each month?

Answer 3

Be careful, you'll want to set an index on your fields that are used as a filter for your view. Otherwise there can be a problem.

Another option is "2000 items per container" which really means folder.