HOWTO: Recover your SharePoint Document Library for use with Zetadocs when you exceed the List view threshold

This Zetadocs technical note applies to:

• Zetadocs Capture in use with SharePoint Online

Summary

The purpose of this technote is to advise on how to recover a SharePoint document library once you have hit the list view threshold limit.

This issue occurs because SharePoint Online uses the Large List Resource Throttling feature. By default, the list view threshold is configured at 5,000 items. When the defined item limit in a list is exceeded, this can start to cause intermittent issues with the Zetadocs Capture feature. For more information on this, please see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/troubleshoot/lists-and-libraries/items-exceeds-list-view-threshold

The reason this will cause problems with Zetadocs, is due to the throttling to resources that will be applied to the SharePoint document library. If the SharePoint site is under heavy use or performs large queries, then it may cause this to go much slower or just refuse to run the query. Zetadocs relies on running searches when refreshing the factbox, so if this is then limited by SharePoint, it will cause problems for the users using the Zetadocs software.

This technote will guide you through the best approach of recovery from the problem and then best approach to avoid this moving forward.

More information

To confirm you have the list view threshold error

To see if your SharePoint site has been impacted by this issue:

1. Sign into your SharePoint site as a site admin
2. Browse to the Document libraries that are in use by Zetadocs
   1. Please note we use all document libraries within the site that have the ‘Zetadocs’ content type enabled.
   2. So please run this check on as many document libraries where this is the case
3. Open the library settings
4. If this has gone over the limit, the warning message will be displayed at the top of the settings page with a graph showing you what the limit is and how far you have gone over the limit. The error message will look like this:

Best practice approach to recover the current document library

The best approach to recover from this is to determine which folder(s) in the library are at fault and is over the 5000 limit. Once you have this, you can move files out of this folder to ensure that you are under the threshold.

The easiest way to do this is to use a feature within SharePoint called ‘Generate File Plan Report’. As there are different ways of generating this including doing this from PowerShell, please see the SharePoint documentation for the version of SharePoint you are running or reach out to Microsoft, to help you understand how you can run this feature.

Once you have this report, it should give you a list of folders and the number of items within the folder. You can then filter by the highest one. It will look like this:

Using this, you can split the affected folders so that the folders at fault are under the list view threshold. If you are moving files within the same ‘Document Library’ this will keep the Metadata attached to the file. If you move it to a different ‘Document Library’ within the same site, this will need to have the Zetadocs Content Type enabled on or the metadata will be deleted and not searchable within the Zetadocs fact box.

Best practice to avoid this reccurring or happening in the future

When configuring Zetadocs, we highly recommend using date as the first folder in the folder structure. After the Date folder then you can then use Company and record type in any order.

To set this, please open the Zetadocs General settings from within your Dynamics NAV or Business Central environment. From here you can modify the folder structure.

This method would create a new folder each day, which will have its own sub folders. Avoiding a single folder where all the documents are being stored.

Also please see our guide on how to plan for a SharePoint site: INFO: SharePoint Archive File Planning Advice for Zetadocs for NAV (equisys.com)

References

Links:

INFO: SharePoint Archive File Planning Advice for Zetadocs for NAV (equisys.com)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/troubleshoot/lists-and-libraries/items-exceeds-list-view-threshold

Last updated: 22^nd March 2022 (BB/CR/NT)

Keywords: Zetadocs, Capture, SharePoint, List view threshold