It all started by meeting Tianyi Jiang and Atif Rawn from AvePoint in Dubai, April this year. I had a good talk about their product and its capabilities which resulted in a demonstration. I have had two long (but great) sessions with the guys from AvePoint UK explaining to me all the functionality DocAve 4.5 for SharePoint is delevering to us all.
AvePoint is the creator od the award-winning DocAve platform which specializes in enterprise-strength backup, recovery, and data management solutions for the Microsoft SharePoint product and technologies. It gives Administrators a large subset of great tools above the standard SharePoint functionality. They have already more then 2000 customers worldwide including Bloomberg, Bill & Melinda Gated Foundation, Deloitte & Touche, Nothwestern University and so on.
So lets talk about the DocAve platform. The platform contains the following functionality areas:
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Backup & Recovery
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Archiving
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Administration
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Replication
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Compliance
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Migration to SharePoint
All these functionalities are available through a rich GUI application and there for easy to understand and easy to use by any person. This makes it flexible and easy to implement in your organisation. An example is shown below:
Because the tool has a centralised browser-based interface you can perform all actions and steps over multiple farms from one single location.
Backup & Recovery
We first started with a demonstration of backup and recovery. As you all know you can do backup and restore from within SharePoint but only on site level. Their are indeed a lot of other products for doing this. But the AvePoint platform is incredible. It is possible to backup and restore on not only site level, but also on document level and even on document version level. It does not stop there: You can even backup and restore entire SharePoint farms, including all servers and back-end SQL databases containing the configurations, index / job servers as well as front-end IIS settings and file system resources like the web.config file. To my surprise it had little to no effect on the live environment while performing a backup and restore.
The backup and recovery supports also:
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Scheduling of backups
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Data encryption up to 128 bits
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Backup and restore of metadata, security settings, customized layouts and files from the 12 Hive
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It uses load-balancing between front-end web servers for efficient resource utilization
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Speeds up to 175 GB per hour
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Including site definitions, InfoPath form templates and content from Project Server
Archiving
If there is one thing which is expensive, its valuable SQL Server space. When you need to expand your environment consider installing DocAce Extension Archiver for SharePoint 2003 & 2007. It archives your data to the file system instead of SQL Server. You still maintain the ability to access your content and sites and even search through it as if it was an active SharePoint site.
Some of the functionality:
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Full-Text search
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High speed Archive / Restore (speeds up to 60 GB per hour)
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Archive data encryption / compression
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Archive to any storage sysem
Administration
Administration is now possible from a single interface to give organisations control over their enterprise-wide SharePoint environments from a single farm to hundreds of farms. So what you get is a centralised console for doing all your administrative tasks in your enterprise. Administrators can easily view, search, manage, report and replicate configurations, change security of individualy content objects or bulk. For example you want to set the rights of a leaving employee to only view rights. Normally you have to go through all the sites and its content changing the security settings. Especially when you are not using AD groups to maintain user transparency. With DocAve SharePoint Administrator you can select the farm(s) and with one click on the button change it everywhere.
The web interface gives you the same functionality as in Central Administration extended with new functionality which you can execute over multiple farms.
As you know you can do most administrative tasks through the STSADM application. Todd Klindt gives a great presentation about this subject. Even some functionality is only available through this command prompt tool. AvePoint has included all methods from STSADM in their web interface and can even execute those commands over single and multiple farms. They are currently working on describing each method provided to make it even more clearer for the Administrator to use it.
Some of the functionality:
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Graphically display server topology along with server functions, relationships, roles, services and system health
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Performing Central Administration functions across multiple farms
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Managing of configurations
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Manage and update user securty across multiple objects at all levels
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Centrally plan, schedule and execute STSADM commands through the web interface
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Generate sophisticated reports about system health and action history
Replication
This is something I like the most of the AvePoint platform. If you need restructure or synchronise content between sites, applications and servers this is the product. It maintains metadata, configurations and security settings. You just choose a source and a destination and check content you want to deploy. In cases where you have two production environments (DMZ and Corporate network) you maintain your data in the production environment of the Corporate network. Using scheduled deployment you deploy non-critical data into the production environment of the DMZ which can be accessed by the public through the internet. But what to do when you need collaboration with your relations? Relations can only access your environment at the DMZ. SharePoint does not support synchronising back into the production environment of the Corporate network without getting conflicts. DocAve Replicator for SharePoint 2007 solves this problem. :)
Some of the supported functionality:
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One-to-Many Replication
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Byte-Level Differencing
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Two-Way Replication
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Backup Before Replication
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Restructure of SharePoint environments
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Throttle control and dump to local location
Compliance
It can not be said enough. One of the most important things within collaborative workspaces and centralised repositories for content within enterprise enviroments is compliancy. Joel Oleson gives a great presentation about this subject. AvePoint has two products. The first product is called DocAve Compliance Archiver which extract content into a secured area storing records, audit data, enforcing retention policies and ensuring compliancy with the highest regulations. You can search accross archived content for legal discovery issues, audits and reviewinf of archived data. The second product is called DovAve Auditor and monitors access to and usage of content within SharePoint. This includes usage, search and security changes.
To give you an idea about the technical specifications of their products:
- Full, AutomatedData Capture
Selected records and content, including securities and metadata are extracted and archived away in immutable form
- Intelligent Information Retrieval
Full-text search on archived content and metadata with advanced search capabilities such as date ranges, relevance ranking, and search term highlighting
- Flexibly Define Retention Policies
Defineretention policies at various levels, with built-in data pruning
- Record Export for External Review
Ability to sample items randomly or based on predefined parameters in response to regulatory inquiries, and export in a portable format
- Offline Reporting
Push long running search processes to the background,allowing compliance managers continued access to DocAve
- Track Audit/Review Activities
Centralized location for review and audit of archived content, with tracking of activity history
- Granular Auditing
Enable/disable auditing from the Web application, site-level, or even down to sub-sites and individual folders
- Comprehensive Event Tracking
Collect critical metrics and view data or pull reports by numerous attributes such as Time Viewed, Modified, Deleted, Added, Renamed, User, etc.
- Permission/Security Audits
Record and track all security, schema and profile changes
- Audit SharePoint Search
Audit SharePoint search, including queries and results
- Optimized Storage
Fetch and store archived content and audit activity on tiered storage, freeing up valuable SQL Server storage space
Migration to SharePoint
I have been stunned by the way how migration is handeld by AvePoint. I have lot of indepth experience of the API model of SharePoint and we have even created our own migration tool for migrating between WSS 2.0 and WSS 3.0. But that is nothing compared to what the product of AvePoint is capable of. Next to that is that they have already some years of experience doing migration projects at small and large customers. Migration is not simple and there are always issues regarding customisations. Even AvePoint told me that some parts are difficult to migrate. But they have enough experience to guide these migration processes and solving those issues. To give you an idea of what is possible:
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SharePoint 2001 / 2003 migration to SharePoint 2003 / 2007
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Public Folder / Exchange public folder migration to SharePoint 2003 / 2007
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File System migration to SharePoint 2007
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eRoom migration to SharePoint 2007
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Lotus Notes migration to SharePoint 2007
Its possible to schedule and monitor the migration, but even better: you can do a full and granular backup. So whats the advantage of that? You do a full backup while everybody is still working on the environment. This can take some time for large environments and you don't want people to interrupt in their work. Finally you do a granular migration in the weekends for the changes made to the environment by users during the full backup. Why didn't i came up with that idea :)
Using other site definitions and improved Web Part components in your new environment? No problem. As long as the new site definitions contain the same Web Part zones and Web Parts are having the same name (its not checking the GUID) you're fine.
Conclusion
I'm exicted about this platform and i'm certainly gonna introduce it to my customers. It will resolve a lot of problems we currently have with regards to backup, migration, administration, content deployment and compliancy. Including AvePoint platform in your solution to the customer will give the customer a complete solution for their platform.