Are there limits to the number of shared folders?

[Darwin]

I am investigating whether OneNote can solve a particular problem within my
organization. It seems promising. However, we're talking about thousands of
shared notebooks with the potential of tens of thousands over time. Are
there constraints/challenges on the number of shared notebooks that OneNote
can handle?

 

[Erik Sojka]

I've not run into any, and I use shared folders heavily. The constant
polling needed to keep all Notebooks up to date will incur some network
traffic, and you will get different performance depending on where the
Shared Notebooks are stored (SP tends to be slower than SMB shares, etc.)

Are you talking about an individual user accessing thousands of Notebooks,
or are you talking about thousands would be available in general?

 

[Darwin]

It would thousands of notebooks accessed by between 10 and 30 users. Also
applications would be feeding notes, telephone recordings and documents into
the shared notebooks and potentially retrieving the documents from the shared
notebooks as well. Each shared notebook represents a customer and would
become a repository of every communication with that customer along with
documents provided to us by the customer. Does that sound like an
appropriate and intended use of OneNote?

 

[Ilya Koulchin]

You could certainly try it, although I'm not sure how well OneNote's
performance will scale at that level. The UI is likely going to be very
hard to navigate with that number of notebooks, especially considering
that the notebook list isn't sorted automatically. Another approach
would be to keep a single section per customer, and maybe somehow break
up the customers into separate notebooks (alphabetically, or by
state/region, or whatever).

 

[Erik Sojka]

Yes, but I would rethink the use of thousands of Notebooks. I would
recommend adding more content in each Notebook, and reducing the overall
number of Notebooks. The UI isn't really suited for that many Notebooks.
It's not a performance issue necessarily.

Within a Notebook, you can have many layers of data and pretty much any
type of organization you want.

 

[Rainald Taesler]

It would thousands of notebooks accessed by between 10 and 30 users.
Also applications would be feeding notes, telephone recordings and
documents into the shared notebooks and potentially retrieving the
documents from the shared notebooks as well. Each shared notebook
represents a customer and would become a repository of every
communication with that customer along with documents provided to us
by the customer. Does that sound like an appropriate and intended
use of OneNote?

Contrary to the others I do not think that you should follow this way.
I really love ON, especially as it's so flexible.

It's good for at least 1001 things.
But it definitely is not a replacement for a CRM system and/or a
database solution for handling customers.
Honestly speaking: Me shudders when thinking if basing business
management on something like ON.

Sharing the data would not be the problem. But IMHO a system like that
would hardly be manageable - even when not using individual notebooks
but using notebooks with nested sections (what Erik seems to suggest).
And it would not deliver the aggregated data needed for leading a
business.

In addition: ON IMHO is not robust enough for basing a business on it.
All proper database systems have sophisticated backup, replication and
history features.
Even using ON's backup files and educating the user to back frequently
could not at all provide the necessary security.

Do yourself a favour: Give up the idea of using an instrument for
note-taking <!> as a replacement for a business database system.
Hire a consultant and let him check for a database system suitable for
your business.

Rainald

 

[Darwin]

All very insightful comments. I wasn't really thinking of it as a CRM type
of tool. There wouldn't be any data, per se, stored about the customer, it
would simply be a central place for a customer service person to find all
notes, recorded messages and documents pertaining to a single customer.

I was worried about whether the UI would lend itself to this scale of a
project. We have a unique ID for each customer that everything would be
filed under.

Considering organization challenges, the customers are assigned to a
specific customer service agent. Perhaps sections could be created for each
customer service agent and the customer notebooks placed in the appropriate
section. However, there would still be hundreds of customers per agent.
Also, is it easy to move a notebook from one section to another? Is there an
API for OneNote? Or maybe SharePoint is simply the better choice? Somebody
above used the acronym SMB that I'm not familiar with. What is SMB?

Thanks all.