SharePoint Benefits and Challenges
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.
The benefits SharePoint delivers are undeniable: better and more efficient team collaboration, version control for documents edited by multiple team members, and faster access to information through searches.
SharePoint brings a new level of structure to high-volume, user-generated content. However, the viral spread of SharePoint throughout organizations combined with its distributed deployment model presents significant challenges to the efficient management of this collaboration environment:
- Limited native backup and recovery. The existing SharePoint backup solution is limited for any organization beyond a small business because of the time for recovery (RTO), the inability to provide item-level recovery, and the significant hardware costs for recovery. The built-in SharePoint recovery tools require a separate recovery farm of servers and disks that can modify metadata such as date and time stamps and IDs of users who checked in the document when items are recovered. Recovery is a time-consuming, multi-step process. SharePoint’s native backup operation involves reading a large amount of data, so running it frequently can interfere with system performance and even block end-user access to sites. In fact, the SharePoint backuptool, Stsadm.exe, is intended to back up and restore top-level Windows SharePoint Services Web sites, it is not designed for item-level recovery.
- Increasing storage costs. The distributed nature of SharePoint deployments allows content to grow virtually unfettered. While it is possible to manage storage size by setting size quotas on site collections, this may limit end-user productivity and it hinders the ability to manage the information lifecycle effectively based on size and age of content. It is also exactly what organizations tried— and failed—to do with email. Organizations using MOSS can employ Information Management Policies, which can allow for the expiration of content, but these are time consuming to implement in environments with many web applications and/or multiple SharePoint farms. In addition, SharePoint’s Version Document Libraries store full copies of document versions (not just the delta between versions), resulting in significant additional storage costs.
- Retention management. It is challenging to implement effective retention and disposition policies to reduce eDiscovery and compliance risks because of the lack of central control over distributed deployments and the difficulty implementing Information Management policies in organizations with multiple SharePoint farms.
- eDiscovery. SharePoint does not offer an interface or workflow for legal teams to perform activities such as conduct unified searches across deployments, place a legal hold without making another copy of an item, or review, tag, and log exports of potentially responsive content.
