Hi. My company has a requirement for field personnel to complete a variety of paper forms in the the field, in areas of little or no connectivity.
We have identified a mobile data collection application that allows employees to complete forms offline and sync data back when connections permit. This application then posts data to our SharePoint Online 2013 environment, each unique form posting to a corresponding unique SPO list. From there it can be accessed by employees and reported against using PowerBI.
Using SPO as the storage for this form data is not intended to be a permanent solution - we anticipate it being only an 18-24 month solution as we intend to rebuild it on another platform.
Our infrastructure group is concerned about storing this data in SPO citing the following concerns:
- Number of items in a SPO list
- Overall data size in SPO
- The above items affecting other applications the overall performance of our tenant as a whole
Here's some information on anticipated items and size based on a 3 month trial we completed. The data below was extrapolated from that and pushed out to 36 months of use - more than we would anticipate.
Total number of forms (list items) submitted - 2,850,000
These would be distributed across 39 individual SPO lists, not evenly though. 2 lists may approach 1,000,000 items each
Total size occupied in SPO - 165Gb
Of this, 159GB are signature images from the forms (small PNGs) stored in the Pictures folder.
Actual form data in the 39 lists would be approximately 4.8Gb.
We may modify the forms to require an employee number be entered instead of the signature eliminating 159Gb
I'd like some of your high-level opinions of suitability of SPO 2013 to handle the above data requirements.
Thank you *very* much in advance.
Robert