SharePoint Archiving; The stuff that breaks with many products
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.
So the same approach was taken to SharePoint by many archiving vendors as they did in the past with Exchange. To prevent excessive storage growth, you archive old data and replace it with a link.
A pretty blunt approach as what many vendors have forgotten when they took shortcuts to offer SharePoint support is how end users actually USE SharePoint.
The problem with many SharePoint archiving applications is that their shortcut approach will actually result in breaking many of the functionalities that end users rely on.
For instance, when they start stubbing/archiving data from SharePoint and replace it with a stub, it will modify the icon to a html link which will confuse end users.
Secondly, and more importantly, the removal of the file will make SharePoint think that the document is no longer there and SharePoint will remove the index data tied to this document.
The end result is that the user will no longer be able to search on the file. The developers at Mimosa Systems didn’t want to take the shortcut approach and Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint will, when archiving data, not only leave the documents looking like they are still there, but will also allow the end users still be able to search on the content that was in the now stubbed document.
Transparent for end users
Its all about making it seamless and transparent to the end users.
