SharePoint: The Future of ECM

In today’s hyper-connected world, it can be hard to determine exactly what enterprise content management means to the modern organization. Is it records management? Is it documents management? Is it Web content publishing? Is it online collaboration management?

To most companies, the answer to all of these questions is a resounding “yes.” Today’s successful ECM systems do more than just document (or records, or Web) management. They serve as the underlying infrastructures upon which formerly vertical applications and disparate groups of knowledge workers can seamlessly exchange information and collaborate in a Web-based information infrastructure. They are the ecosystems in which people, processes and information connect.

The primary functions of an ECM system are to capture, store, preserve, manage and deliver enterprise content. But beyond these core capabilities, there are four attributes that every successful ECM system must possess:

• Integration—ECM is not an application. Rather, it is a platform capable of managing, organizing and delivering data from the various business productivity applications and multiple data stores utilized by the organization. With such integration, the ECM system itself should be virtually transparent from the end-user perspective, and thus highly adoptable.
• Scalability—ECM systems must be able to handle voluminous data without degrading system viability, and consequently must be architected in a fully distributed manner, allowing them to be efficiently, securely and cost-effectively deployed to new working groups, wherever they are located.
• Flexibility/Extensibility—Typical modern enterprises have numerous, independent business units that all collaborate and share information with myriad business partners, vendors and customers. Successful ECM empowers an organization to deliver content and manage processes in the precise way each business unit and external party requires, providing intuitive tools to customize elements of the platform to suit the exact needs of its users.
• Usability/Adoptability—Collaboration and teamwork should be part of a successful company’s DNA already—and that’s exactly how ECM systems should be architected. The ECM system must be intuitive, easy to use, and deliver the same look and feel as the business applications workers already use every day.

SharePoint:
The Next Generation of ECM
Among the many technologies on the market to assist organizations with ECM, none seems better poised to dominate the space than Microsoft SharePoint. Appearing on the scene in 2001, early versions of SharePoint were not much more than a rudimentary collaboration application and digital asset repository. But over the years, SharePoint has evolved into something much more. It has become a platform, an architectural framework, a “virtual ecosystem” for the enterprise. Fully integrated with the productivity tools knowledge workers use daily, embedded with best-of-breed enterprise search capabilities, easily customizable and eminently scalable, SharePoint is considered by many experts to be the foundation for ECM platforms of the future. Only one piece is missing from the SharePoint puzzle: For organizations to truly leverage SharePoint as their ECM system, administrators require a tool to efficiently and comprehensively manage SharePoint’s infrastructure. They need a tool to ensure the platform is robustly protected, diligently managed and fully optimized.

Case In Point: Police Academy
As we noted earlier, many organizations are just beginning on this journey toward ECM 2.0—we are nowhere near a saturation point yet. With that said, the way many companies begin to work toward a cohesive ECM 2.0 solution is by first addressing one or two drivers before evolving to the next level. One AvePoint customer, The Police Academy of the Netherlands (Politieacademie), decided to move forward on two of the key drivers of ECM 2.0: preserve and deliver.

The academy serves as the sole training organization for Dutch civil law enforcement professionals. With 1,800 employees in Apeldoorn and numerous auxiliary facilities throughout the country, the academy helps prepare police cadets for service in police departments throughout all 26 civil regions of the country.

In early 2007, the academy decided to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as its online collaboration and digital asset management platform for many of the same reasons—unparalleled abilities in workflow and document management—we noted earlier. The academy deployed a farm comprised of one Web front-end server, one database server and one index server, and immediately began putting MOSS 2007 to good use. The deployment was being used by more than 13,000 end users, including academy staff and other government agency personnel and affiliated contractors.

SharePoint’s functionality is fantastic for scaling, but native capabilities for backup and management are limited. Administrators originally relied upon the STSADM command-line tool for protection and management, but the MOSS deployment grew so fast—including seven gigabytes’ worth of data across 10 site collections—that more rigorous service-level agreements, recovery-time objectives and recovery-point objectives had to be established. Also, a data-protection solution had to deliver granular, item-level backup and restore capabilities so when documents were accidentally deleted or corrupted, administrators wouldn’t have to restore their entire SQL database just for one document. “The backup solution was not enough,” said Jeroen Gorter, webmaster of the knowledge network group at the academy. “We could tolerate only one-hour data loss windows and STSADM backups were far too cumbersome to meet that, so we needed a better way.”

Additionally, because the academy wanted to make much of its intranet-based SharePoint content available via the Internet, it desired a means to replicate site collections across domains in real-time. SharePoint’s native tools did not provide such functionality.

In search of a solution, the academy’s administrators tested several products, including DocAve’s Backup and Recovery and Replicator modules. During this evaluation process, administrators learned that DocAve delivered granular backup functionality, whereas all other solutions relied solely upon SQL backups. This meant that—using another solution—the academy would not be able to design different backup plans for various datasets, based on data criticality and intended storage targets. Leveraging only SQL backups, administrators would have to back up their entire database as often as they desired to backup their most important data; a resource-intensive and wasteful process.

Administrators designed and implemented a multi-tiered data protection strategy for their over 7GB of data. The academy is now able to granularly backup data and deliver each discrete backup to target disks for optimal use of existing resources. All legacy backup data is pushed to tape and pruned to maintain a weekly disk-based record.