Best Practice for Thousands of Folders?

[njensen]

Hello, we're evaluating Alfresco for storing client documents. We have roughly 10,000 clients, each of whom will have anywhere from 2 to 20 documents each.

I understand that we can create custom content types so that we add metadata to the documents for searching, but I'm not sure how we would handle the actual storage of the documents. Would we create 10,000 folders in the document library (one for each client)? Does the web client handle this gracefully in terms of performance and usability? 

Or are we better creating a limited hierarchy to the folder structure to ease navigation? (for example, first level of folders to group clients into groups of 100's).

Any experiences or best practices on how to handle this scenario would be appreciated. Thanks in advance,
Neil

[zaizi]

Go with the latter. Organise your folders into a limited hierarchy. E.g. group clients by region or first letter.

Try and use drop folders. Folders into which content and just dropped which triggers content rules to move the data to a more organised location. Makes it easy for users to add content without thinking about where it should stored.

[lotharm]

I can second that, use sub-folders to keep the number of documents per folder small to achieve a reasonable browsing speed. Alfresco caches a lot, so if it is fine for you to wait a little on the first click, it might be fine to have a lot of documents per folder.

Regards,
  lothar