Monday, January 14, 2008

Archive for Sharepoint ? Symantec Enterprise Vault...

You know how it is, when someone ask you a question you have never been asked before and a week later you are being asked the same question again ?

That's what happened to me today. One of my customers who still has only Sharepoint 2003 environment , wanted to try an archive product that he has for free from some vendor agreement he has.
The product is by Symantec. The name is Enterprise Vault AKA Veritas.

How it works ?

Very simple.
Application tier, DB ( sql server ) tier and Storage repository ( SAN or NAS ).

In the application tier you configure the policy ( which Sitecollection and Virtual servers you are going to archive, which files to archive and etc ).

In the DB, the application stores the location ( pointers ) of the files/item that were archived ( which is now located in the storage repository ). Yes, you the sharepoint administrator can say what the heck ? but that's the whole idea. In your sites you left with only an html link ( a stub ). When you click the item/file it goes to the Sql Server, check the pointer and retrieves the file from the storage.
Yes, The DB will shrink to a much smaller size you what it means...

What else you need to know ?
You get a webpart, for searching the files in the storage repository.
Symantec has a feature for archive in Exchange servers and it works very well ( Basically, it works in the same mechanism as Sharepoint does ).

Sounds nice, so should I go for it ?
Well, Im sorry to say but NO.
Cause this product is still not there. It has some several main issues that won't make it feasible to be deployed in any of my customers.

For example :

1. It doesn't support kerberos authentication. Only NTLM.
2. When you archive ( including the moving to the repository ), it leaves a stub which is a the "name of the file" dot HTML. Ya, You get broken links ( users who made bookmarks, links in sites and etc ).
3. The Sharepoint search engine can't crawl any of the items that were archived.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Welcome to my blog

Hey all,

I'm a Sharepoint/Moss developer and administrator since 2004. During those years I can't even assume how many times I found blog posts that helped me.
That's why I decided to write this blog, to share and help others as much as others blogers helped me.

Hope you will find those posts useful.

Rotem.