SharePoint Adoption Trends and Takeaways
The third approach is to expose content in the legacy system through SharePoint. Third-party tools can surface content from structured data systems and even file servers as native SharePoint lists and libraries. This means that you can eliminate migration entirely, or use the approach as a transition between the legacy system and SharePoint.
Storage optimization: Another critical consideration for planning and architecture is storage management and optimization for SQL Server.
SharePoint stores all content of a site collection in a content database. The size of content databases should be limited to support service level agreements (SLAs) for performance and recovery, and general guidelines limit content databases to 100GB-200GB.
Remote BLOB Store (RBS), new with SharePoint 2010, stores the documents outside of the content database, so that the content database itself contains only a link to the BLOB and metadata. This can significantly reduce content database size, improve performance and optimize storage costs. Third-party RBS providers can provide greater performance, more granular management of rules, and a wide variety of targets for the RBS—from NAS devices to shared folders to cloud-based storage.
Recoverability: It goes without saying that job #2 for an IT professional—after security—is to ensure data is not lost. You must have a plan to recover data within a defined SLA. Out-of-the-box, SharePoint can recover a site collection. Granular restore in SharePoint 2010 can recover a site, list or library. But there are significant caveats—for example, you can restore a document library but not necessarily workflows associated with those documents to the same point-in-time—and you cannot easily recover a single document or list item. Perhaps most importantly, SharePoint backup does not capture everything necessary to recover in any scenario. Be certain that you’ve identified the disaster recovery scenarios that you must support, the SLAs for recovery time and recovery point and that you’ve built or acquired the tools necessary to achieve those goals.
Redundancy: In many organizations, downtime equals lost revenues. SharePoint 2010 leverages the mirroring capability of SQL Server 2008 R2 to provide a level of failover for loss of connectivity to a content database. But other scenarios, such as the lost WAN connection mentioned earlier, or a disaster eliminating the farm, are not addressed by out-of-box capabilities.
Governance: Certainly one of the hot topics for supporting scaled adoption of SharePoint is governance. Governance is defined as people, process, policy and technology. The first three are highly dependent on your organization, and there are numerous resources online to guide you through the “soft” side of governance. SharePoint features support many aspects of governance, including security, content management, branding, delegation of administration and auditing. But these features are often limited to individual site collections or Web applications. So if you have more than one site collection—and you should—or more than one farm—and you should (test farm, anyone?)—SharePoint’s out-of-box tools make it difficult to gather distributed information and to drive configuration across the enterprise.
Although the drivers—and subsequent implementations—for SharePoint vary, it is clear that SharePoint tends to rapidly become a mission-critical content repository, a provider for collaboration and a platform for enterprise services and line-of-business applications. For these reasons, you must plan for SharePoint as a platform and address a variety of considerations—sooner rather than later—to support the growth of SharePoint in your enterprise.
Ramping Up SharePoint Adoption with DocAve
Consider AvePoint’s DocAve Software Platform, a fully integrated solution for SharePoint lifecycle management, to bolster SharePoint adoption.
Scalability & Reliability
1. Deliver granular content and configuration replication—one-way, two-way, and one-to-many—among any SharePoint farms, including compression, throttling controls, byte-level differencing, and offline replication options with DocAve Replicator.
2. Automate the deployment of applications, customizations, solutions, and design elements across sites and farms with DocAve Deployment Manager.
3. Immediately offload BLOBs to cloud- or file-based storage, expose external content through SharePoint without migration, and archive SharePoint content from SQL and/or BLOB stores to lower-tiered storage with the DocAve Storage Optimization Suite.
4. Granularly backup and restore with full fidelity all SharePoint farms—including externalized BLOBs, solutions, configurations and Web front-end components—from a single interface with DocAve Backup and Restore.
5. Maintain a warm stand-by environment for one-switch failover and continuous SharePoint availability with DocAve High Availability.
Global Content Access
1. Offer full synchronization of SharePoint content and data in real-time or according to pre-determined schedules with DocAve Replicator.
2. Automatically route unstructured documents to lower-tiered storage with DocAve Extender.
3. Automate the process of consolidating content from 14 legacy repositories into SharePoint with DocAve Migrator.
4. Present and manage any documents, audio or video files through SharePoint without the need for import with DocAve Connector.