The DocAve Forum

There's a lot of debate out there as to whether Sharepoint or file shares are the best storage solution for your company’s document libraries.  If you google "file shares vs. sharepoint," you'll find over 450,000 results containing heated discussions on both schools of thought. 

Advocates of file shares maintain that they are a cheaper storage solution, allow faster acccess for large files, and provide redundancy (RAID, etc) to protect business-critical documents.  

Sharepoint admins like to argue that because these documents are so business-critical, it’s not enough just to store them in a reliable location.  Backups and reliability aside, care needs to be taken to allow for accountability and auditing for document modifications and views.  Knowing which users are viewing the document and tracking the changes they are making is just as important as the document itself. 

DocAve's Extension Archiver can effectively bridge the gap between file shares and Sharepoint.  By pulling your large files (PPT slides, documents, video files) out of Sharepoint onto a cheaper storage solution (such as a NAS), the data can be stored cheaply while allowing Sharepoint to continue auditing and tracking access to that document.  This is done by pulling the file out of the SQL database and placing a DocAve "stub," or redirect url on its old location.  This document can then be searched using the native Sharepoint search, viewed, and easy restored to its original location if changes are required.  The fact that this file is stored outside the SQL server is practically transparent to the end-user, save for a small archiver icon in place of the original file icon!