Movement on the SharePoint List 5000 Item Limit!
In October, Eric Alexander (@ejaya2) posted an idea to the SharePoint UserVoice called Prioritize large list management in SharePoint Online. Yesterday I received an alert about it because I had voted for it.
'Prioritize large list management in SharePoint Online' https://t.co/L1NQ0Gpsyc -> Status went from 'unlikely' to 'Working on it'!
— Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc) November 15, 2016
The 5000 item limit has been an albatross around our necks since SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2007 was the wild west days: we could pile as many items into a list as we wanted and retrieve them without a problem, though perhaps at the expense of performance.
I’ve railed about this limit many times in the past, like here.
If you search the SharePoint UserVoice for “5000“, you’ll find no fewer than 14 suggestions circling this topic. There are probably even more, but without the number 5000 in them.
Luckily, our good friends in Redmond know this is an issue for us. As of yesterday, Eric’s suggestion moved to “Working on it”, at least for SharePoint Online.
I’m looking forward to what happens here. As Eric notes in his suggestion:
If nothing can be done, then TechNet NEEDS to indicate that the actual limit of SharePoint Online lists and libraries is 5,000 items, not the current architectural limit of 30 million.
The more we want to use SharePoint as a service (SPaaS?), the more important it becomes to get past this limitation.
I’m certain that the work Dan Kogan (@kogandan) and his team are doing on the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) has made it obvious that this limit is a serious issue. (Sometimes you have to take the albatross off your neck and slap someone with it.)
