Archive for the ‘SharePoint’ Category

“A recent proposal will mandate the current and future governors of New York to use an email archiving solution that will offer permanent access to important documents, the Times Union reports.

The most recent proposal marks the second-consecutive year New York lawmakers have passed legislation that creates more strict regulations forcing governors to submit emails to state archives. The bill’s proponents have stressed the historical benefits of integrating a government email archiving solution.

The legal hold requirement is vastly misunderstood in my opinion. I have run into many corporate counsels that have the opinion;”I just send and email out to anyone in my company that could have responsive ESI asking them to be sure not to delete any data about the following subjects”. Then, if the delete something they shouldn’t have, it’s their neck, not mine or the company’s.

A recent research by Applied Research has shown that almost 90% of organizations see value in having a data plan, however less than half of those actually has a plan in place.  In my experience even the plans that are in place are lacking or inadequate.  A lot of organizations, when they plan for a data retention plan, only think about the obvious, which is tapes and email, however valuable data, or electronic records, are in much more data repositories than many organizations realize. 

I love SharePoint.  It came a long way from the first release in 2001 and a lot of organizations are now either planning or deploying SharePoint 2010.  For the last year and a half I have spoken at many events (amongst them the Microsoft Worldwide SharePoint Conference) on the need for SharePoint Governance.  While some organizations are indeed taking this seriously others are falling short in many areas to prepare themselves.  In many organizations IT will deploy SharePoint without consulting the Legal and Records Management departments and maybe this has to do with the fact that many SharePoint developers feel like they have been given the key to their own ‘SharePoint Kingdom’ and that its their project/baby.

This week I am speaking at the SharePoint Summit 2010 in Montreal Canada about the need for archiving and eDiscovery for SharePoint.  I thoroughly enjoy speaking and always try to give people a few takeaways from my sessions.  The session will be held on Tuesday April 13th in the Mansfield Room and I will cover quite a bit of ground;

First let me explain what BLOB stands for.  A Binary Large OBject is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single ‘file’ inside a database.  Within SharePoint these are your office documents, images, audio and video files.   While I have no doubts in the overall scalability of SharePoint, the product has some points that all SharePoint administrators and designers need to be aware off.  Microsoft is so kind to publish extensive documents that go over the software boundaries of SharePoint.  The following table lists the recommended guidelines for site objects according to Microsoft:

First of all, many of you are wondering what RBS is.  Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) is an API that is available as an add-on feature pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express.  It is designed to actually move the storage of binary large objects (BLOBs) from costly storage on database servers to cheaper storage solutions and is also available as  such for SharePoint Portal Server.  The advantages of RBS are that it can save you a significant amount of storage space, conserves hardware resources and allows the end user transparent access to their data.

Last week I spoke at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference on records management and eDiscovery. I will make my deck that I used available later this week, however while I was at Las Vegas one of the whitepapers that I worked on was made available on the Mimosa Website. You can actually download the whitepaper on this link.

Today I ran across a report from AIIM which says that 18% of the companies that have SharePoint deployed within their organizations do not know if sensitive documents are actually stored within their SharePoint farm. Many people follow widely published SharePoint governance plans however now that SharePoint is getting more traction and more attention these plans are starting to fall short of preventing some issues.

Most organizations do see the benefit of SharePoint archiving to not only keep the excessive growth of their SharePoint farm in line, but also to ensure that only relevant data remains in the system. What many SharePoint archiving offerings from other 3rd parties do is what many people expect archiving to do. You take the blob out of the SharePoint content database and replace it pretty much with a stub, which sounds like a very plausible and logical thing to do.