Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

I’ve been in this industry for most of the last decade now and have seen pretty much all the ways archiving products can and have been deployed in organizations. From small to Fortune 500, they all are slightly different in the way their internal IT is being managed and used.  Archiving products can have a big impact on your infrastructure with requirements and there is one particular piece that I’d like to highlight in this post that many forget.

With all the attention on Exchange 2010 Archiving I’d like to point out that Mimosa Systems currently has an on demand webinar available on the real story on Exchange 2010 archiving.  You can check it out at:

http://searchexchange.bitpipe.com/data/document.do?res_id=1254157530_411&li=171411&asrc=EM_RWC_9746531&uid=8803465
In this webcast, learn more about the buzz surrounding Exchange 2010′s archiving and retention capabilities. Discover how the features of this technology can improve message management and ensure compliance requirements are met. Get a handle on expanding email volume with Exchange 2010 archiving functionalities.

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.

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.

Well … I needed a catchy title to grab your attention here.  By 2010 80% of organizations is expect to be using SharePoint internally which is starting to bring challenges for maintaining it. 

The distributed nature of SharePoint allows for almost unlimited storage growth resulting in SharePoint becoming another dumping ground, just like Exchange and Public Folders became in the past.