Incoming Faxes Can Take a Long Time to Route to SharePoint

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Justin Crosby and Jim Martin]

Customers who configure SBS fax to route to SharePoint and are heavy fax users may notice a delay in routing that gets progressively worse over time. Depending on your fax usage it may takes years to become notable. This is because individual SharePoint document library folders are optimized to manage up to 2000 items. Once you go past this limit SharePoint will experience delays when parsing the data. This in turn, will cause fax routing to become slow. Additionally the server will not be able to receive new, inbound faxes while the previous fax is being routed.

To avoid this issue we recommend periodically archiving old faxes by moving them out of your incoming fax document library folder. SharePoint is also tuned to support up to 2 million items as long as they are spread out in different folders. Therefore you could create date based folders to organize your old faxes such as “Q2 2006” or “October 2005” depending on your needs. Depending on your server’s hardware and current workload you may find that your optimal values vary.

For more information on SharePoint capacity planning please see:

 https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/wss/2/all/adminguide/en-us/stsb07.mspx