I am at present paying dearly for not reading the fine print.
I work at a large company, and we have SharePoints. We have more than one. Just in my group I think we have four. In some cases, the SharePoints are tied to a Teams instance, which means the security for access to said SharePoint is driven by membership to the Teams team. Because Teams does not restrict membership to security groups and instead does membership to individual humans, this can make for an administrative nightmare.
At any rate, I am having to move things from Teams-SharePoint-Locked-Folder to Regular-SharePoint-Locked-Folder and in order to do that there’s this handy-dandy little “move” function right at the top navigation. You can select all manner of things, select “move”, tell it where you want to move it to, and just hit go. It’s just that easy.
Except it is not.
Because the move functionality has unexplained and unannounced limits – at least no process on the site tells you about those limits, you have to actually RTFM, which is found at the very bottom of this page. Those limits are both in file size, number of files, and total file size. I did not know this two days ago, when I hit “move” and walked away thinking in 30 minutes everything would be magically done.
Instead, what happens is SharePoint looks at its old location (hm…) and at its new location (hm…) and starts to build out the folder structure in the new location before moving files. So that when it chokes — and it will choke — you are left with folders that are empty in your new location, and all your files still sitting merrily in your old location. Then, if you try to move folder by folder, it will give you a duplicate of your new folder, in your new folder location (e.g., now you have Folder and Folder1). Seamless transition this is not.
I am a victim of my own shortsightedness, and now I must pay – delicately and carefully deleting empty folders, then manually chunking and moving files, all in an environment where people are trying to use said files. Don’t even get me started on the One Note. I am, at present, 9 hours into this endeavor (of course I am multitasking).
The thing is, we set ourselves up for failure – or headaches – when we don’t read the fine print. Reading the fine print takes time, and effort, and sometimes it is incredibly boring, and often complex: it’s the written equivalent of bran. We all know we should do it and some of us do but you only get the benefit at the very end of the process (and depending on how long you waited to do it, it can be a really messy end).
We’re in that time of year (at least at my company) where we are evaluating again: ourselves, our teams, our output, our goals, our objectives, how we measure people/teams/features and how we should think about strategy. In times where there is Too Much Going On it is tempting to have the mindset of “I’m sure this will just work” because 1. in so many cases it just does and 2. the idea of investing the time into reading the documentation “just in case” seems limited. Until the end.
Choose your shortcuts wisely.
Bobbie Conti 