A Catalyst For Good Information Management
Microsoft SharePoint has attained mass adoption beyond everyone’s expectations. It is hard to think of any other recent business application that has attracted more organizations and more users since its inception than SharePoint—and it isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.
One big thing that SharePoint was designed to do, and does very effectively, is connect information with those who create it. A simple and understandable user experience has been a key reason for SharePoint’s success. The ability for individuals within organizations to create a central spot where other individuals can retrieve, consume and affect information in a collaborative fashion has improved productivity, to say the very least. But, and I’m not the first person to say this by any means, what makes SharePoint great can also—if left unmanaged—bring an organization to its knees.
Dramatic? A little bit. But let me preface the rest of this article by saying that the benefits of deploying SharePoint can far outweigh any challenges it “might” create... that is, as long as you attend to the development of a solid information management strategy that includes SharePoint but spans your entire information infrastructure.
SharePoint is not the source of the problem. The bigger issue is the ever-expanding amount of corporate information. By 2020 there will be 35 zetabytes of information out there. How much is that? It is the number 35 followed by 21 zeroes. So the problem isn’t why we should stuff it all into SharePoint, it is really how are we going to stuff it all into SharePoint and once we get it in there how the heck are we going to manage it… efficiently and effectively.
Bringing It All Together
I wish I could say that we have achieved the goal of a “paperless society,” but I’d prefer to keep our trusting relationship intact. Many companies are still dealing with reams of paper and faced with the challenge of how to integrate that physical content into their information systems so they can leverage its value and manage it more securely. Once you’ve decided on a capture solution for all this physical content, where should you put it? That’s a rhetorical question, of course: you should put it somewhere where the right people have easy access to it.
Perhaps that’s a file share? Sure, we’ve been dumping information into file shares for years. Even with the advent of enterprise content management solutions, information has still been placed onto insecure network drives. Whatever the reason, we’ve all struggled to find that magic axis of information enablement, where the back-end systems can do their thing managing the information and the end-users could attain simple access to it.
This brings us back to SharePoint. SharePoint really has become a catalyst for good information management because it connects the people, the content and the technology. On its own it offers an extensive breadth of capabilities, but (and there is always a “but”) we really should be thinking of SharePoint as part of the information infrastructure and not the information infrastructure itself. It’s one piece of the puzzle to be sure, but there are many, MANY parts involved in every organization’s information infrastructure and it makes sense to figure out how to leverage them all together.
So what do you do to stop the digital deluge of information from overwhelming your information infrastructure? What do you do to avoid having SharePoint become a clog in your information infrastructure’s plumbing?
The first and most important thing to do is understand what you really have. Perform an audit of all the information in your organization and divide it into a few basic piles:
- Business-critical content people are using regularly;
- Business-critical content that must be kept in line with corporate policies or industry regulations that is no longer being accessed; and
- Content that should be deleted.
Once you’ve figured out what you have, you’ll likely know where it should live.
Regardless of where the information goes, it should all appear in SharePoint as that will be the ubiquitous access point. Also, it’s common sense to believe that information under long-term preservation requirements should likely be stored under a more cost-effective tiered storage architecture in some sort of archive managed against compliance, but what about “active” content?
Making Content Available to Users
Active content is just that: information that users are actively working on or referencing. Immediate access is required to ensure the SharePoint user experience goes unaffected, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the content itself has to live within the SQL Servers that support SharePoint. The common term is “externalization,” and with regards to SharePoint it ultimately means moving or redirecting content normally bound for SQL Server to a lower and more cost-effective tier of storage.
With externalization in place, the content “BLOB” (binary large object) is redirected to the repository of your choosing and the metadata continues on its path to SQL Server. What this does is ensure the transparency we are all so eager to maintain. With the metadata in SQL Server, SharePoint believes the content itself is living natively within its four server walls. For example, if a file has been externalized, it can still be immediately accessed directly through SharePoint.
For many organizations, simply moving the files and content into cheaper storage is only the tip of the iceberg. They also have broader business needs that must include information created in SharePoint. This is where SharePoint often plays a role in the greater and existing information infrastructure. SharePoint content can also be natively stored within an existing and established ECM environment. Many ECM systems have been highly tuned to support business process services and transactional content management capabilities, and additional retention and formal and federated records management. By connecting SharePoint to an ECM system, companies can better utilize the information they have and involve it in important business processes to bring further value.
Finally, as the amount of information continues to grow, a large portion of it naturally becomes inactive over time. Content and site retirement can help reduce the load on the SharePoint environment. Moving this information to a compliant archive ensures continued accessibility to users while securing the content under long-term retention. This is another important consideration when incorporating SharePoint into your information management strategy.
Hopefully this gives you some good insights into how to best utilize SharePoint within your organization and how to tie it together with the systems that make your business run so that you can be even more effective. SharePoint can be a powerful tool when the information delivered in it is properly managed, controlled and archived. Avoid headaches later by thinking through all these aspects as you incorporate SharePoint into your stable of business applications.
For more information, visit
EMC.com/sharepoint or email
sharepoint@emc.com.