Buyer's Guide: SharePoint Archiving Solutions

Microsoft SharePoint has become what email was a decade ago: a dumping ground for content. Companies are realizing that this content needs to bemanaged, secured, and -- in many cases -- archived.

The first two needs are obvious, but why would you want to archive SharePoint content? For three simple yet compelling reasons: data reduction (whichcan affect performance), governance, and compliance.

"Archiving tools . . . help you maintain the size of your content databases as well as allow for real-time version-history archiving," said ErrinO'Connor, who has more than a decade's worth of experience with SharePoint and is founder and CEO of EPC Group.net. Helping achieve the goals of agovernance plan is yet another reason for archiving SharePoint content. "Archiving old sites that are no longer used -- this is key, as it's importantto either delete or archive content that's no longer relevant," O'Connor said.

Easily retrieving that content is important as well. "You may have a project team site that was used for a project and that project is over, but in ayear or two a similar project may pop up again and the project manager or team members may want to go back and restore that archived site to follow thebest practices or lessons learned from that previous project," O'Connor said.

Archiving is a basic best practice in records management, but there's an even more compelling reason for some organizations. "Archiving is aboutcompliance," said Ron Charity, a SharePoint product manager who has worked with SharePoint since 2001 and focuses on governance, informationarchitecture, technical architecture, and operations. Compliance with industry or governmental regulations is essential for many, if not most,organizations, especially in the United States, which is home to the largest percentage of the world's lawsuits. Compliance and auditing capabilitiesgo hand in hand with archiving. As O'Connor explained, "You can restore an archive to a site or SharePoint instance and make that data available toauditors and e-discovery activities without affecting the live SharePoint farm."

But SharePoint 2010 has the ability to declare records in place, so why would you need a third-party archiving solution? For one thing, Charity said,many organizations need a compliant archival engine (e.g., compliant with US Department of Defense -- DoD -- requirements). Another reason, he said, isthat "enterprise records management systems scale much better due to N-Tier architecture and use of the file system for items and SQL Server forlogic." Additionally, you can't beat the convenience of certain third-party products' features. "When archived data is disposed of, client systemsissue certificates for legal purposes," Charity said.

What should you look for in a SharePoint archiving solution? Seamless integration with SharePoint is obvious, and vendors accomplish this goal indifferent ways. For example, many solutions stub the item in SharePoint and move it to the archive, whereas some solutions integrate with SharePoint atthe event-handler layer to capture items. Can end users search for and access archived content in SharePoint? They'd better be able to, unless you liketraining them on new solutions and procedures.

E-discovery capability is useful; as part of that, so is the ability to archive all content types and data in SharePoint. Also consider how the vendorpackages a solution, whether as a suite or a standalone product (only your organization's needs should determine which option is best for you). Thenthere are things that you won't know until you try a tool: how flexible it is, how easy it is to use, and how responsive the customer service is.

The buyer's guide table shows a sampling of SharePoint archiving vendors and the particulars of their solutions. If you're still not sold on the needfor archiving SharePoint content, read the AIIM blog "The Case for SharePoint Archiving." Another useful blog poston SharePoint archiving and what to look for in a SharePoint archiving solution is Geoff Evelyn's "SharePoint Archiving -- Defining a Way Forward."