If your SharePoint is starting to look a little cluttered and becoming hard to navigate, it’s probably about time to start implementing some new strategies to manage your lists/libraries. The Office 365 blog gives many ways to alleviate the burden of having a vast expanse of items. Some of these are:

• How to use index management

• Using SharePoint search function

• Navigating with metadata

• Utilizing a filtered view with column indexing

• Organizing libraries into separate folder

• Using the Content Organizer & Document Center site

• How to synchronize large lists

• Using the Preview Pane view style & Group By view style

The basics

Using Index Management allows users to give SharePoint the ability to identify and create an index for folders automatically. Simply turn on the setting “allow automatic management of indices” in the settings menu.

The search function in SharePoint is particularly useful because it allows you to expand the scope of your search significantly and pinpoint exactly what you’re looking for with keywords. The default is it limited to the current view but this is customizable through the refinement panel where you can filter through multiple variables including Boolean syntax.

As an alternative to using a view that cannot query a list with indexes, metadata navigation functions to work as a contingency. This query will only search the newest items, up to 1,250 of them.

Creating column indexes improves list and library overall performance by augmenting the efficiency at which items can be retrieved. To the use filtered view, make sure that there are not more than 5,000 items in the specified index.

A little more advanced

Data access efficiency can be easily and quickly improved by organizing libraries into folders. This then allows for SharePoint users to look at all available folders instead of viewing everything at once, thus decreasing the chance that items will be mistakenly added.

SharePoint also allows users to utilize free tools like the Content Organizer and Document Center Site to organize your libraries and lists. The Content Organizer functions to automatically create folders based solely off of the metadata properties while make the most of the file size occupancy. With the Document Center Site, a pre-designed template is utilized to hold many documents in a central location. This is best used when multiple user activity is particularly high to reduce user confusion.

To synchronize large lists, simply enter the data you want to synchronize into either Microsoft access or Microsoft Excel. After doing this, activate this option in the services and you can form a two-way connection to look at and manage your data bases’ latest entries.

If you think viewing your items in a vertical list arrangement would help you organize, try using the preview pane view style. This is used most commonly to avoid continuous scrolling in horizontal lists of data. Feel free to group by style as well in order to categorize and make the list view more condensed. This makes viewing data much more manageable and easier to sort through.

With these tools offered by SharePoint, managing lists and libraries, although somewhat complicated, is made to be much less of a headache. Looking at thousands of items doesn’t have to always be as difficult as it once was.