SharePoint - document libraries, lists, views and number of elements

Question

I have a lot of documents I want to store in a document library in SharePoint 2010. We're talking about 50k+ documents. I've worked with document libraries many times, but not of this size and I find myself getting confused about some definitions when it comes to how these should be stored and the number of elements allowed.

By looking here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787%28v=office.14%29.aspx#ListLibrary it says that a document library can hold up to 30 million documents. Nice! 50k is not close to 30 millions. However, can I just dump all of the documents into a library without grouping them in views or sub folders? Cause a view only can have 5k elements and then I have to create views and put the documents in many views in order not to exceed this limit.

Now, the documents, and the library, will most likely never be browsed by going to the library. Each document will be linked from another place, and this will also not be that often. Therefore I am kind of hoping I can just dump all the documents in one big library. I have read that if the number of elements in a list exceeds 5k SharePoint will not query the query to return everything, but instead exchange this query with some default query. In my case this is fine, but are there other concerns about dumping this many files into one library in SharePoint 2010? And is there anything else I may not have thought about?

Also quick question at the end, I am planning on scripting the upload by using PowerShell, but I have heard from others that uploading documents this way to SharePoint could takea lot of time because it does it one document at the time. Is it possible to "bulk upload" documents through PowerShell or another approach?

Answer 1

The key here is to understand that SharePoint can STORE up to 30 million documents, but can only display 5,000 at a time. The easiest way to maintain that would be to dump the documents into separate folders with no more than 5,000 documents in each folder. Its easy to do that, but I'm not a big fan of folders since they impose a single organizational structure on a set of documents. Applying metadata and then filtering views is more efficient in the long run, but much harder to do when dumping documents into a library. I would suggest looking at some of the third party migration software that can do this kind of bulk upload and still maintain appropriate metadata. One I've used (there are others) is Metalogix Content Matrix.