When migrating content from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint Online, one of the key considerations is the space allocation for your organisation’s tenant. This is a short post covering how this is calculated, the other service allocations and ways of managing or maximising the total allocation based on the services included in you license plans.
So what can this space allocation be used for and how is this calculated? Essentially, this the space required for your various collaboration sites: Yammer, Communication, Hub, MS Team/ Office 365 enabled team or Classic (groupless) sites. If you read the Microsoft guidance covering Online limits : SharePoint Online provides an initial 1 TB. In addition, you then get 10GB (up from 0.5GB) per each licensed user.
Taking a working example of 1000 E3 plans and 500 E1 plans, the total storage allocations is
1TB + (1500*0.01TB) = 15.12 TB
Just to reiterate, licenses do need to be assigned before they can be included in the available space calculation.
Other allowances
- OneDrive – each user gets up an initial 1 TB of personal storage in their OneDrive For Business (ODFB) allowance. However, users in organisations of greater than 4 users can request that this is incrementally extended, up to 5 TB. A Global or SharePoint Administrator will be responsible for servicing such requests.
- Exchange Online – the online storage is determined by the type of mailbox and the subscription type. Essentially each E1 or E3 user will get 100 Gb of storage. For further details see Exchange Online Storage Limits
- Additional storage for a subscription is available at £0.13 per GB. This is ideal for smaller organisations with larger space requirements
Manage or Maximise
For various reasons, you may want to limit the numbers of users being on boarded over a series of migration phases thereby reducing the need to have all the potential storage available from the outset. A key benefit of this approach is spread the operational expenditure (OPEX) costs including licensing and user training across successive financial years.
Some organisations my want to considering doing creative things with storage afforded by ODFB. Although it is not recommended approach for larger organisations due to some loss of governance and control, it is less of an issue for smaller organisations
Simon Hudson , regular blogger and one of the organisers of the Yorkshire Office 365 User Group : offers a number of proven architecture models recommended for clients who wish to manage content on ODFB in order to maximise their overall allocation.
One of the great things about Office 365 is the range of ways you can store knowledge and collaborate. That’s also its curse. As with all information and knowledge systems you need a clear information architecture and that needs to reach right across SharePoint, Office 365 Groups, Teams Yammer and ODFB. You’ll regret it if you don’t!
Simon Hudson, Director
I will be looking at the defining an example of such an information article in a subsequent post. Anyway, I hope this post has been useful and please feel free to add any comments.
This is great – I’ve been asked this dozens of times by uncertain clients.
A slight addition; F1 licences don’t attract any central storage (i.e. they don’t get the 10GB each). Also be wary of Stream; great though it is, it comes out of the same storage pool and can eat it up really quickly if you are in the habit of storing lots of HD video.
Thanks for the mention Dan!
Thanks Simon. Good points regarding F1 license not attracting the central storage and monitoring the impact of HD videos created with Stream. As an aside, I guess I could have discussed configuring hybrid to make additional storage available to the users in the tenant. However, though a viable approach thoughts of cracking a nut with a forklift truck, spring to mind!