Migration - RealSharePoint.com

6/4/2009

Sometimes life doesn't have to be difficult. If you've ever found yourself wondering how to efficiently move from one stage in the product lifecycle to another in your Sharepoint environment, then consider this:

Hector Ruiz, a consultant on the London Tideway SharePoint Migration project, writes in his blog about his success with DocAve's content management capabilities. Hector got the job done using DocAve's ability to set backup schedules and out of place restore capabilities.

Posted at 2:35 PM by AVEPOINT\Jack.Kuo | Category: Migration; Backup and Recovery; Deployment Architecture | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/13/2009

Microsoft's Michael Gannotti Podcasts About DocAve

If you're a fan of SharePoint you've probably heard of Michael Gannotti, one of the most highly regarded experts in the SharePoint community. As a Senior Technology Specialist at Microsoft, he keeps a pretty close eye on trends in the SharePoint multi-verse. Michael's blog is one of the most popular on the web, and his podcast, Mikey's Tech Talk is a great weekly resource for the latest in SharePoint tips and trends.

Recently, Michael podcasted about AvePoint and DocAve. He had recently seen a demo of the product, and had some pretty intersting things to say. It's a great episode, so be sure to check it out here.

Posted at 3:29 PM by Tucker Hall | Category: DocAve Tips and Tricks; Migration; SharePoint News; Events and Happenings; SharePoint Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

2/13/2009

Takeaways for SharePoint Migration – From the San Francisco SharePoint User Group

Bud Porter-Roth and I tag-teamed at the SharePoint User Group in San Francisco yesterday evening. The topic of the evening was centered around migrating content on SharePoint 2007. Bud provided a high level overview of the strategy and process of migrating various types of file-based content onto SharePoint, while I, or the propeller-head, as Bud called me, showcased an automated approach using the DocAve File System Migrator. It was definitely one of the larger groups to participate at this SPUG event last night, even with a storm heading towards the city. The crowd consisted of a mixture of SharePoint newbies, some developers, some administrators, and even some business analysts. With such a diverse audience, I think our content was spot on. Bud probably wanted me to get into some additional technical detail, but I think I left my propeller at home. Plus, I was distracted with my poor network connectivity that drastically affected the effectiveness of my animated presentation. (I might add that part of me couldn’t wait to get to Beard Papa’s for those tasty cream puffs at the Westfield).

The overall strategy that we covered was relatively simple:

Identify business and IT stakeholders
Identify content, whether it’s files, discussion threads, or other collaborative type data
Cleanup unnecessary or stale content
Map users, groups, ACL’s, metadata
Be wary of restrictions (i.e. blocked file types, unsupported characters)
Determine migration strategy - migrate everything, or use a phased approach
Model and test for validation
Execute migration

I think most in the audience agreed that this is easier said than done. Yes, there are strategies out there, and yes, there are tools out there that can help. But the real takeaway is that migration is complex, and it must be treated as a real IT project. As Bud put it so eloquently, “People get cranky when they can’t do their work!”.

Posted at 9:24 PM by Andrew Yeung | Category: Events and Happenings; Migration | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

2/9/2009

Organizing in SharePoint: Do You Folder or View?

As SharePoint adoption spreads through your organization (unless you're coming to SharePoint from another legacy document management system like Lotus Notes) you'll probably find that your SharePoint document libraries and task lists look a lot like the folder system your users used to keep on their desktop. Every project gets its own folder, every document type has it's own subfolder, and so on.

I should know, I still manage some old projects that way...

"I know where everything is!" is a wonderful way to justify the complex layout. But ask someone to step in for you on a vacation or a new project and you'd be lucky not to recieve a few calls while you're boarding a plane or enjoying the weather on the beach. Inevitably, if I leave my elaborate older structure in the hands of another, I come back to find things miscategorized or just lumped in one directory. Also, try and duplicate that layout on a new project and you'd find it hard to set it up the same way twice.

SharePoint library and list views is a powerful way to organize your content from the start, and to reorganize content once it's already loaded. With one table of metadata I can sort across projects, content types, audiences, or any other field tag. I've also found views a great way to interact with team members on projects, assigning projects using audience targeting (the most basic targeting being a filter where the "Assign To" column equals "[Me]"). Not to mention, it's very easy to create views and tagged lists as templates without including content for duplicating structure from project to project.

It's easy to get people in your company who are used file system structure to become SharePoint view users. The DocAve File System Migrator enables an option in the document library's "upload" drop-down menu that will allow your end-users to not just collapse a directory tree directly to the root of the Shared Documents library. It also has the added advantage of automatically tagging the data with the original directory location for easy creation of views.

If your users have already started cluttering SharePoint with folders, you can use the DocAve Content Manager to copy the contents of all subfolders to their parent to encourage organization. The simple SharePoint based method is to create views that use the "show all items without folders" (flat view) option under the "Folders" section (though this switch is easy to forget if you're creating a blank view). I also find the "group by" function a happy medium between a folder-system structure and a single list.

But beware! As wonderful as views can be, SharePoint never gives you a solution without presenting a problem. AS fate wouldhave it, you can't filter or sort a list by a column that allows multiple entries. This means you can't easily group or sort on a field that includes multiple assignees, sort by a "choice" field with multiple selections, etc. But I have founf that with enough views and extra filters, this problem is easily remedied.

Posted at 4:50 PM by John Hodges | Category: SharePoint Tips and Tricks; Migration; Administration | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/22/2009

AvePoint Releases DocAve v5.1.1

Holding true to its reputation for delivering pioneering solution enhancements before the competition has even caught up with its last round, AvePoint has released DocAve v5.1.1 - which includes some pretty amazing upgrades to the DocAve v5 platform released last fall. Here's a quick rundown of the cool new gadgets and features you'll find in this latest release...

Real-time Extranet Replication

DocAve Replicator provides for both live and scheduled extranet synchronization. By enabling one-way and two-way replication over HTTP/HTTPS internet protocols, DocAve Replicator unburdens administrators from having to open additional ports in their firewall, or ensure that all replication agents are within the same network.

Administration Security Trimming, Dead-Account Detection/Deletion, One-Step Permissions Transfer

DocAve SharePoint Administrator now empowers SharePoint administrators to delegate security management to site collection administrators – providing them trimmed views of, and control over, only content and users for which they have been given appropriate permissions. Additionally, SharePoint Administrator now includes an automated dead-account recognition, transfer, and deletion utility. This powerful tool compares discrete SharePoint accounts with those present in Active Directory, and provides administrators with flexible options to handle asynchronous account events, including account deletion and permissions transfer to new accounts.

End-User Archiving and Comprehensive Archive Reporting

DocAve Extension Archiver now lets administrators empower their end-users with the ability to archive content directly within the SharePoint interface. Via the Site Actions menu within SharePoint, end-users can archive content for which they have permissions, enabling business-apprpriate archiving levels and optimal platform performance. Additionally, DocAve’s administrative report now provides comprehensive archiving information, including archived site size, number of items archived, and SQl storage re-patriation statistics.

Total EMC Centera Integration

Now EMC Centera users can leverage the solution’s potent du-duplication capabilities fully when managing DocAve archive and backup data. DocAve Backup and Recovery and Extension Archiver empower EMC Centera users to enable integrated de-duping of their DocAve archive and backup stores, to ensure optimal storage resource utilization.

XML-Based Mapping Profile Integration for Migrations

DocAve Migrator Suite lets administrators import and export XML mapping profiles to further streamline migration jobs requiring extensive mapping. Now administrators can edit profiles in any XML editor, upload the file into DocAve, and both manage and track the authored files via the DocAve interface.

To learn more about the DocAve v5.1.1 release and to download a fully-enabled trial version of the platform, check out the AvePoint website.

Posted at 11:26 AM by Tucker Hall | Category: Archiving; Backup and Recovery; Compliance; Deployment Architecture; Events and Happenings; SharePoint News; Migration; Administration; DocAve Tips and Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/9/2008

DocAve v5 Released!

The latest version of the DocAve Software Platform by AvePoint has been released to the public! This new and improved version has been re-worked from the ground up to make it the most robust and powerful suite of products available for SharePoint infrastructure management. The GUI has undergone tremendous changes from its predecessor, and users will now have the flexibility to protect SharePoint "in style" with the new navigation enhancements.

Along with the GUI, DocAve 5 offers new products such as Deployment Manager, the Automation Center for Data Protection (including the Criticality Matrix), migration from Lotus Notes, Real-time Replication, and several other enhancements to the original DocAve suite.

Check out your demo today!

Posted at 9:44 AM by John Hodges | Category: SharePoint News; Archiving; Backup and Recovery; Administration; Compliance; Events and Happenings; Migration; Deployment Architecture | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

8/22/2008

SharePoint and Java Standards - Oil and Water Don't Mix

I ran into an article this morning entitled "Independents Seize on Success of Microsoft's SharePoint". I had expected to see a comprehensive report on a state of the SharePoint partner ecosystem, which include a multitude of 3rd-party vendors that provide various solutions that enhance SharePoint functionality, or fill in certain gaps. What was interesting about this article was the focus on JSR 170 as a way for integrating SharePoint into legacy enterprise content repositories.

As I read through this article, I tried to think back and recall which one of the customers we've worked with have actually attempted this route of integrating SharePoint with other systems via standards. There aren't many. And this is not just JSR 170, but also other standards such as WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets). Yes, SharePoint has a WSRP Consumer Web Part, but I have never seen any organization use it heavily to access non .NET-based portlets. The fact of the matter is that everyone knows that standards only offer the least amount of capabiliities because of the wide range of vendor solutions that they need to support. Getting SharePoint to work with these standards has proven to be challenging, and the resulting application experience is typically less than desirable.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for standards, but they're just not quite there yet, and competition leads to vendors trying to one-up each other by providing even more innovative features via their proprietary technology stack, and that will benefit the end users regardless. The real question is does SharePoint really need to rely on these standards to be considered "enterprise ready"? Perhaps not.

Posted at 11:42 AM by Andrew Yeung | Category: Migration; SharePoint News; Administration | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

8/4/2008

SharePoint or Legacy Content Repositories, What's Your Pick?

As part of AvePoint's Summer Seminar Series with Technet Magazine, we recently held another live webinar, this time on migrating and consolidating content onto SharePoint 2007. I love having audience participation, as this provides a clearer picture of the state of SharePoint from the customer's point of view. I posed another interesting survey question to our live audience. This time, the question was: "My organization currently uses the following platforms in addition to Microsoft SharePoint".

Here are the poll results:

Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 / SharePoint Portal Server 2003 - 48.9%
SharePoint 2001 - 6.5%
Microsoft Exchange Public Folders / Windows File Shares - 79.3%
Documentem eRoom / EMC Documentum - 9.8%
Lotus Notes - 14.1%
OpenText LiveLink / Stellent / Others - 4.3%

~50% still on the SharePoint 2003 platform? That's a large number of organizations that still hasn't upgraded to the latest and greatest 2007 platform. It was unfortunate that the utility we used to conduct this live online poll limited us to five choices, since it would have been really helpful to get some further breakdown between Exchange Public Folders and Windows File Shares as well as the different collaboration and content management tools provided by Documentum. There is little doubt, however, that organizations have a lot of mission critical content in existing legacy repositories such as file systems (duh!) and Exchange Public Folders and are searching for reliable ways to maintain access this this content through SharePoint.

Another interesting data point that I would like to share is that nearly 30% of the audience indicated that they are looking to integrate these legacy content repositories with SharePoint rather than migrating content over. I guess for these organizations, as they performed their cost/benefit analyses, realized they would rather maintain all of these disparate systems as opposed to simply managing a single one, which is SharePoint. Go figure...

Posted at 1:54 PM by Andrew Yeung | Category: Migration | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

7/17/2008

Illegal Characters During File Share->Sharepoint Migrations

Many SharePoint administrators have come across this error “Cannot copy <Filename>. The parameter is incorrect.” This is an error caused by illegal characters in file names such as / \ : * < ># <TAB> { } % ~ &. You may also get this error if the file name starts with ~ or has one or two periods at the end of the file name. If you are uploading many different documents from a File Share to SharePoint your project will become very tedious because you will have to rename each file with the correct format for SharePoint to accept. As the administrator you can tackle this problem in two ways: Either manually rename each file to the correct format for SharePoint to accept or find a 3rd party tool that can help you map each illegal character to a legal character in SharePoint. Most folks seek out a 3rd party solution when performing large migrations...it's just not worth their time doing it manually.

Posted at 11:03 AM by Faraz Saiyed | Category: Migration | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

7/15/2008

Exchange Public Folder vs. SharePoint Guidance

Many customers come to AvePoint in search of a migration solution from Exchange Public Folder (EPF) into SharePoint. During our conversations, many of these clients tell me they are leaving EPF because - as a platform - it will soon no longer be supported by Microsoft. Because this is such a big move for an organization, clients will often ask me to highlight the pros and cons of moving from EPF to SharePoint. Here's what I think...

The major advantage SharePoint has over EPF is its ability to allow teams to communicate and collaborate. By providing an easy, intuitive way to share documents and other information - with versioning tracking and check-in/check-out functionality - SharePoint simply blows EPF out of the water. Add to this SharePoint's capability to manage workflows and govern access rights, and EPF really can't compare.

For those wanting to learn more about the differences between the two platforms, here's a great document published by the Microsoft SharePoint Product Group that analyzes the issue in detail. Public Folder vs SharePoint Guidance

Posted at 1:12 PM by Wei Chen | Category: Migration | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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