Trouble with SharePoint file size limits? How to share large files over 2GB fast
If you work for an organization or company and you use a computer, you’re likely tied to Microsoft Office. And if you regularly collaborate with coworkers, SharePoint is probably also in the mix. According to Microsoft, “More than 200,000 organizations and 190 million people have SharePoint for intranets, team sites and content management.”
SharePoint is great as a web-based collaboration platform for Office documents, which tend to be relatively small files. However, if you’re having trouble with SharePoint file size limits, you’re not alone. Today, most organizations are expanding their use of video and graphical content for everything from marketing and sales to employee training and conference presentations, and those files are substantially larger than most Office documents, often well over 2 gigs.
Although the maximum file limit for SharePoint 2016 is 10GB and 15GB for SharePoint Online, SharePoint in general wasn’t really designed to handle large files and sets default threshold limits at 2GB.
Why the huge gap in SharePoint maximum file size capacity and reality?
SharePoint is highly customizable and IT departments typically deploy SharePoint according to a number of internal factors such as hardware resources like CPUs and RAM, server and storage capacity and network latency and bandwidth. Most IT departments set hard limits for things like document size, the number of web applications deployed, the size and number of content databases and looong list of other parameters based on recommendations from Microsoft.
Microsoft’s recommendations for configurable threshold limits — like 2GB file sizes — are made based on performance and capacity testing they’ve done in multiple environments and server farms. As they say, “Thresholds can, in certain circumstances, be exceeded to accommodate variances in your farm design, but it is important to understand that doing this may affect the performance of the farm in addition to the effective value of other limits.”
In other words, your IT team could let you send files up to 10 or 15GB, but it would likely take a really long time and impact performance of the entire system. So, what’s the answer? In order to send large files over the Internet, especially to offices in other parts of the country or world, without impacting network performance, you really need specialized acceleration technology.
Many of our customers use Media Shuttle alongside SharePoint for large file transfers between coworkers and with clients. Media Shuttle was originally designed for the Media & Entertainment industry as a SaaS solution for hands-on file transfers. Since its core technology was built for large file transfers over IP networks, Media Shuttle can secureley send any size file, anywhere, quickly, by taking advantage of all available bandwidth and reducing latency on the network.
Media shuttle also has APIs available to create seamless integrations with third party solutions such as SharePoint.
