SharePoint Archiving, Recovery, Retention and eDiscovery

A Better Approach to SharePoint Recovery, Retention, and eDiscovery

The SharePoint® offering from Microsoft® encompasses two products – Windows® SharePoint Services™ (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS).  Organizations deploy SharePoint in order to make information more accessible to end-users and to enhance collaboration among work groups. 

The benefits SharePoint delivers are undeniable, however, the viral spread of SharePoint combined with its distributed deployment model, presents some challenges to the efficient management of this important collaboration environment:

• Recovery − built-in SharePoint recovery tools require a separate recovery farm and when items are recovered metadata, such as date and time stamps and who checked in the document, can be modified
• Storage Cost Management – the distributed nature of SharePoint deployments allows content to grow unfettered while version document libraries store full copies of all document versions
• Migration – organizations wanting to upgrade from WSS to MOSS need to do a forklift upgrade, and those migrating from one version of WSS to another (e.g., 2003 to 2007) need additional tools because the web parts model changes with each version
• Retention Management – the lack of central control over distributed deployments makes it is impossible to implement effective retention and disposition policies to reduce eDiscovery and compliance risks
• eDiscovery – SharePoint does not offer an interface or workflow for legal teams to conduct unified searches across all user-generated content; place a legal hold without making another copy; or to review, tag, and export potentially responsive content

A Next-Generation Approach to Mimosa NearPoint™ for SharePoint Archiving

Mimosa NearPoint™ provides a holistic solution to managing SharePoint data with integrated archiving, recovery, and eDiscovery. NearPoint is the only SharePoint management product to combine both archiving and recovery while maintaining easy end-user access to information. In addition, Mimosa NearPoint offers the most comprehensive SharePoint data capture available. 

• Capture all content types and associated metadata
• Perform continuous capture via Change Notification, and preserve the relationships between sites and content
• Execute full-text indexing and global single-instancing on all archived content
• Achieve storage cost savings, as content can then be offloaded from SharePoint while maintaining seamless end-user access via stubbing
• Manage retention and disposition (disposal) of SharePoint content across the archive in accordance to your policies

Figure 1 - NearPoint for SharePoint Architecture

With comprehensive capture and archiving capabilities also comes the ability to provide robust SharePoint recovery functionality. Mimosa NearPoint allows both fine-grained and coarse-grained recovery (Figure 2).

Figure 2 - Mimosa NearPoint Fine-Grained and Coarse-Grained SharePoint Recovery

For fine-grained recovery, NearPoint allows administrators to browse and search the SharePoint hierarchy, via the NearPoint admin console, to select a recovery scope (e.g., specific item) and destination. Content can then be restored to the original or to a new destination while NearPoint automatically resolves discrepancies and respects permissions.

With coarse-grained recovery, NearPoint recovers full SharePoint environments. This provides both recovery and migration solutions for SharePoint components such as the front-end web server, content databases, shared service provider (SSP) databases, the configuration database, and the search database and search index files.

Figure 3 - Seamless End-User Access to Archived SharePoint Content

Mimosa Systems offers a SharePoint Archiving and Recovery solution that has the tightest integration with WSS and MOSS of any product on the market.  With Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint, you get all the benefits SharePoint has to offer, while gaining more control over the growth and management of SharePoint content and storage, better risk management with centralized retention policies and legal hold, and the ability to sleep well at night knowing recovery at any level of granularity is immediate. 

Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint offers:

Figure 4 - Mimosa NearPoint eDiscovery Console

NearPoint for SharePoint Archiving:

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