Upcoming mandate for improved app operations

Recommendation made a Mandate!

In an effort to offer a more scalable and reliable performance for all our customers in the future, we are putting a limit to the number of app items that can be saved in an app. This is required to offer a general better experience working with Podio apps and follows in continuation to one of our post mortems published back in 2019.

Podio is built as a project management and CRM tool to help users collaborate and be productive. However, it was never built to serve as a large scale database to millions of app items in one app. The same has been stated in our Podio Help Centre article on Known Limitations in Podio with a recommended limit of 500,000 items. However, we still see certain apps containing items way beyond this recommended limit and have been the primary source of latency for overall Podio. Therefore, we have decided to put a hard limit on the number of app items per app to our maximum recommended limit of 500,000 items.

Action Items - What needs to be done?

If your organization currently operates with one or more apps nearing this limit, you need to control or update your work processes on Podio to ensure you stay well below the limit, else item creation in the app will start failing on reaching the limit, as soon as this hard limit is Live.

If your organization already operates with one or more apps beyond this limit, we need to work together to find a future, more scalable solution for your team long-term. We have already reached out to a few organisations on this list and will be reaching out to others soon. In order to not disrupt your business operations suddenly, you will be allowed a buffer timeline (post the Go-live date) to get below the app item limit based on your use case, data volume and other parameters upon discussion with Citrix Podio Product team.

How can this be achieved?

Few strategies that can prove helpful to get below the recommended limit:

Start using a new fresh app for this use case and archive the current very large app. You can clone your current app to get the same structure in the new app. Some workflows like workflow automation if not cloned over, can be exported and imported back to the new app. External API integrations will need to be migrated manually.
Logically segregate your app items in one large app and distribute into multiple smaller apps. This can be achieved by first cloning the app structure from the current large app. Then exporting all app items, segregating logically and importing each logical set of items to an individual app. Some examples of logical segregation would be alphabetical grouping (by item name/title field), grouping my year (of a date field), grouping by owner,
Work to slowly delete app items in order to ensure the app in the future will be able to operate below 500,000 app items in a sustainable manner. If you decide to go this route, it is very important you schedule deletion to happen slowly over weekends using the Podio API. We do not want you to delete all items at once as that would increase queue delays, but schedule deletion on a weekly basis, over weekend downtime. You can always take a data backup for future reference, before starting the deletion.

Your business use case would drive which of the above strategies best suits your app data.

Tips:

Request help from a Podio Partner to guide you through the best strategy and get you below the 500,000 item limit per app to avoid any disruption to your regular business processes. You should also check out the Podio extensions page which offers you extensions to help copying data in Podio or store a backup of your data before deleting the same from Podio.

Timeline:

This app item limit will be pushed live for all apps with less than 500,000 items in week of 6th April 2020. Exact date to be published later.

If you have questions or concerns about this upcoming change, please reach out to our team here.

Thank you.

/Pallabi - Product Manager

Official comment

Pallabi Patnaik

April 02, 2020 09:09

Dear Users,

Hope you all are staying safe.

This is a reminder that the app item limits (500,000 items per app) will be applicable starting next week, and an update on the exact date when this app item limit goes live.

Planned Date of Go-Live: 8th April 2020 (Wednesday)

Please note:

This limit only applies for apps that currently have less than 500,000 items.
Apps that have already exceeded the limit, will not be impacted with this release, so as to avoid sudden disruption in your business operations.

For instance,

If you have an app A which already has equal to or more than 500,000 items (say, 650,000 items), you will have business as usual on the app even after 8th April. Podio team will connect with you separately to work on reducing the app item count, allowing you a buffer timeline to adjust your business processes.
If you have an app B with less than 500,000 items (say, 410,000 items), you will have business as usual on the app till the count of items in the app reaches 500,000 items. After that, users will be unable to add more items to app B till items are deleted from the app to reduce the count before the limit.

I believe, this illustration would help understand the change better.

Thanks,
//Pallabi - Podio Product Manager

Kathryn Gonzales

March 05, 2020 21:04

Thank you for taking this difficult step forward. I imagine there will be some organizations that will feel put out by the necessity to suddenly change their business processes.

That said, the recent and recurrent latency issues on Podio have caused some of our non-profit's mission-critical processes to slow or halt. This has left staff and clients without a reliable means to coordinate continuity of care, referral to community partners for further assistance, and general back-office functions like reimbursements and accounts payable.

We've been with Podio since the beginning. And while Podio has grown much farther and faster than we have, we're happy to be customers and thankful for the thoughtful approach to platform development and maintenance that's been taken over all of these years.

All our best from Out Youth in Austin, Texas!

Sara Høeg Højlund-Rasmussen

March 09, 2020 15:27

Thanks for sharing Kathryn, we are happy and proud to continue to support your non-profit's critical work.

Best,

Sara & Pallabi