TeamTime - FAQ - Capacity Guidance

How many users can TeamTime support?

There is no limit to the total number of users TeamTime can support, but there is a limit on the number of users it can support in each individual TeamTime site.

You can create multiple TeamTime sites – e.g. http://sharepoint/teamtime/deptA and http://sharepoint/teamtime/deptB etc.

We recommend that you create one for each team or small department. Each site should be used by around 10 to 50 users.

Keeping the individual TeamTime sites quite small has the following benefits :-

  • You keep below the List View Threshold of 5,000 records for longer before having to Archive off old information (see below)
  • You can have different Project/Task lists for each team and site so users don’t see irrelevant projects and tasks.
  • Each team can have its own Settings and security.

How should I organise my TeamTime sites?

There are no hard and fast rules and exactly how you do this depends on your organisation and how you intend to use TeamTime.

  • Think about the List View Threshold (see below) and the number of records you will store.
  • If you will want to be able to run reports to cover a long period of time (e.g. 6 months v monthly) then you will need to keep the number of users in each site low. See below for more information.
  • If you have teams that do different things then you will likely want them in separate sites so they can have different project/task lists.
  • Likewise if they have different settings and preferences (working hours, custom columns) or different security settings (approvers).
  • The most common way of organising the sites by functional teams or departments – e.g. Marketing, IT, HR etc – but you may wish to split them up more than that, e.g. “IT – Network and support” and “IT – Development” depending on the size of your teams/departments.
  • The other way of organising sites would be on a project basis – for example “Setup new office in London” or “Product X” – this may be more appropriate if your organisation is organised around particular projects and each one would include members from different teams – or perhaps if you perform services for other organisations and want to record time spent on each customer or project.

What is the List View Threshold?

SharePoints List View Threshold (LVT) is the primary factor effecting the amount of data that can be stored in a TeamTime site.

The (LVT) is by default 5,000 and this restricts the number of records that can be ‘used’ in one operation on one list.

This limit can be modified in SharePoint Central Administration but it is one setting for each web application so think carefully before modifying it.

You can also suspend it during certain hours (e.g. 10pm to 2am) when it’s out of hours for your organisation and the server is not under much load.

This page has more information - Microosft SharePoint - Manage lists and libraries with many items.

TeamTime warns you if your site has more than 4,000 records in order to give you time to Archive off old information before you reach 5,000 records.

What counts as a record?

Each row on an individual’s weekly timesheet is a ‘record’.

For example in the following Timesheet this equates to 4 records for this particular week

So how many users can a TeamTime site support?

That depends upon how many weeks of data you want to be able to store before archiving and how many rows (on average) a user will put in a timesheet.

You can estimate the size of your TeamTime site in two ways.

The first is the number of weeks of data you can store before archiving given a certain number of users :-

Number of weeks data = 5000 / (Number of users in site* Average number records per timesheet)

The other would be whats the maximum number of users you can have given the need to store a certain amount of data.

Number of users per site = 5000 / (Number of weeks * Average number records per timesheet)

Note - remember you can have multiple TeamTime sites – each one has a separate limit of 5,000 records (the LVT – see above)

How can I run reports that take data from multiple sites?

You can use the Overview site to pull information from several TeamTime sites and consolidate it for reporting.

Depending on how many sites you import information from and if you report Weekly or Monthly depends on the date range that you can report on in one go. If you have a lot of sites and/or want a large date range (e.g. one whole year) then you may have to split it into separate quarterly or monthly reports.

How can I Archive off old information to keep within the 5,000 item LVT?

You can find more information on the Archive manual page.

Can I restore Archives?

No – once data is archived it can’t be restored back into the main site.

However you can still run reports on the data in the Archive and import Archived information into an Overview site.

See the archive and overview site page for more details