Getting More In and Out of SharePoint
It would be fair to say that information growth within organizations has been—and will likely continue to be—nothing less than meteoric. Similar to this has been the adoption of SharePoint. With millions of end users leveraging SharePoint as a central access point for information, it has turned from simple collaboration tool, to universal data store. And rightly so, as it offers a simplified and easy-to-use experience and extended capabilities, that as Microsoft states, brings ECM to the masses. For the purposes of this article let’s focus on the volumes of physical information being ingested into SharePoint, and what we should be considering in terms of making sure SharePoint is being leveraged to its potential, without being abused.
There is no debate: Microsoft Office likely makes up the lion’s share of files in SharePoint. But one area that has the potential to add to the explosion of content in SharePoint is the volume of paper coming into an organization. So how does one get paper into SharePoint?
Now a basic scanning solution might get you part of the way, but with an enterprise capture solution, organizations are able to capture large volumes of documents of any type from anywhere, automate the capture of information into SharePoint and other systems and leverage it across many business areas.
By capturing any type of document from anywhere, organizations can address centralized capture, and extend capture to satellite offices to support ad hoc scanning. In a distributed environment, the time and cost savings as well as risk mitigation attributed to capturing documents at the point of presentment can be significant.
By connecting information to SharePoint and other systems, “intelligent capture” allows businesses to reduce manual sorting and data entry, and accelerates processes. Take these two points and build from them a platform that delivers scalability, and you have an enterprise capture solution that you can leverage across many departments, workflows and geographies.
So what else do we need to consider now that we’ve dumped massive amounts of data and image files into SharePoint? When large amounts of big files are put into SharePoint it can become overwhelmed and issues such as reduced performance and long back-up windows can make IT’s life difficult. Not only this but as time passes and volumes of data grow overall, a large percentage of it becomes inactive or idle, ultimately taking up very costly production server space.
To overcome these potential issues, organizations should look to do a few things: reduce the load on the SQL Servers supporting SharePoint; make sure if content is moved end-users still have access to it; and ensure industry regulations and corporate policies are supported. And just like using an enterprise capture solution to get information into SharePoint, we will extend SharePoint to get “the right” information out.
As noted, having large volumes of active content in SharePoint can have negative impact on search times, back-up windows and overall performance. Microsoft has developed APIs that—when used in conjunction with third-party partner solutions—enable the re-direction of content into more cost-effective and intelligent tiers of storage. This process is referred to as “externalization” and if done using Microsoft’s preferred method, organizations can dramatically reduce the load on SQL Servers while ensuring 100% end-user transparency.
Active versus Inactive SharePoint Content
Old SharePoint content has recently become a concern for organizations, and according to industry averages, anywhere from 25% to 30% of SharePoint sites are orphaned or inactive, taking up costly storage space within a SharePoint deployment. In many cases this inactive content remains within SharePoint because it is considered business critical information that must be kept in order to maintain corporate compliance requirements.
To overcome these hurdles, organizations should consider supporting SharePoint with a long-term content preservation solution, or archive. If organizations are to consider moving content to a data archive, the third-party solution must provide three distinct benefits:
- Improve operational efficiencies by moving inactive content to a more cost-effective tier of storage;
- Ensure existing retention and disposition policies are maintained in the archive; and
- Provide access to archived content (moved and deleted from SharePoint), through SharePoint.
Together, when SharePoint is book-ended by enterprise capture, storage management and archival solutions, the benefits are substantial. The requirement to ingest large volumes of image files into SharePoint can be offset through externalization, and as is most often the case, if those scanned files are business critical and must be managed under compliance it is a necessity to be able to manage those files under retention within an archive. Combine with this the value of being able to connect end users to content, while reducing the burden on IT infrastructure, and this is a solution that extends value while reducing costs.
EMC’s Intelligent Information Group solutions leverage and extend Microsoft SharePoint capabilities. These solutions enable customers to use the familiar SharePoint interfaces to access business processes, workflows and content, enable organizations to scale SharePoint to accommodate enterprise-class document production systems and ensure enterprisewide information governance. By connecting the right information, people and processes, EMC solutions help mitigate risk associated with content within their environment, reduce administrative and infrastructure costs while enabling SharePoint to improve content visibility.
Learn more about intelligent enterprise capture at www.emc.com/Captiva and information governance solutions at emc.com/SourceOneCity.