Archive for the ‘SharePoint’ Category

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.

The last few weeks I’ve been reading SharePoint governance plans and most plans really go into fine details who needs to be on board to get SharePoint successfully deployed in an organization. Microsoft released a paper recently that gives you a real detailed Internet SharePoint Governance Plan. Stakeholders like the SharePoint owner, server administrator, solution architect, designer and developer are all covered, but everywhere were I look at these plans I’m missing very important stakeholders in the decision processes. Where are HR and the General Legal Counsel?

At the core of any good archiving solution is the ability to provide users access to their content in ways that do not interrupt their typical processes. Mimosa NearPoint did this well in the Exchange archiving world by providing users access to email directly in Microsoft NearPoint. The same is true with SharePoint content—users can access content seamlessly through stubs, or pointers, to original content. To users, these stubs look the same as original items, as can be seen below.

The SharePoint offering from Microsoft encompasses two products—Windows® SharePoint Services™ (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS).

Organizations deploy SharePoint to make information more accessible to end users and to enhance collaboration among work groups.

Recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research on over 1,000 worldwide organizations indicates nearly one out of two respondent companies has deployed or is planning to deploy MOSS.

In choosing an archiving solution for SharePoint, it is important to ask these questions:

The last week I’ve worked on submitting my sessions for some upcoming conferences.

For those that aren’t aware, speakers generally submit sessions 6-9 months ahead of a conference to ensure that there is proper time for editing and creating the appropriate demos. 

The whole release and marketing campaign circus around SharePoint 2010 is in full swing and even at Mimosa Systems we are getting ready to ensure that our customers will enjoy SharePoint 2010 with Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint.

I ran across a recent blog post the other day in which the writer states that when Archiving 2.0 arrives, archiving products will not only serve SharePoint, but also capture data from other content sources like email and file servers.

Mimosa offers SharePoint archiving 2.0 already. Combining multiple content sources over point solutions that only serve SharePoint makes sense.