SharePoint Archiving – Defining a way Forward

January 19th, 2010 by Robin Jones

Geoff Evelyn, FIAP enjoys over 20 years’ experience in Information Systems design, development and business IT enhancement. He is a technical evangelist specializing in SharePoint architecture, design, implementation and automation at one of the world’s largest investment banks. He also focuses on business continuity, disaster recovery and numerous related areas, all in the land of SharePoint. When not playing the saxophone – and devoted Dad – Geoff enjoys writing, speaking at conferences, and aiding organisations ‘get’ SharePoint, which is what he’s doing here.

History has a way of repeating itself. Thankfully, when we learn from past mistakes, we can address new challenges more quickly and in smarter ways. In the early 1990s, email emerged as a collaboration mechanism, speeding up communications between multiple parties. It started as a tool only available to high-ranking executives, but quickly grew into the most dominant form of communication. As email use proliferated in the mid-1990s, the volume grew to the point where email servers buckled and IT organisations had to grapple the need to:

Maintain server performance and data-recovery time while an enormous volume of email sat on the production server
Back up exponentially increasing amounts of data and
Perform time-consuming and expensive restoration of back-up tapes in response to discovery requests.

These challenges led many organisations to email archiving. Archiving alleviates the burden on email servers by moving data to cheaper storage, minimises back-up windows by reducing the amount of data to back-up, and streamlines, providing an interface through which to collect all potentially relevant emails and attachments without having to find and restore content from back-up tapes.

Currently, a very similar story is playing out with Microsoft® SharePoint®. SharePoint enables efficient and effective team collaboration, version control for documents edited by multiple team members, and faster access to information via search, while enabling users to create new forms of important content like blogs and wikis in a managed fashion. SharePoint brings a new level of structure to high-volume, user-generated content which, until recently had simply been dumped on to network file shares. Its relatively low cost, ease of use, tight integration to Microsoft Office applications, and wide range of features such as workflow, search and access control, have enabled SharePoint to gain huge traction in the market.

Naturally, organisations want to avoid the mistakes they made with email and instead take control of SharePoint content before it takes control of them. As a result, many look to SharePoint archiving early in the process to enable storage management on the production SharePoint system, recovery of SharePoint content and data and centralised retention management.