If you think your SharePoint environment has grown a tad large, you're not alone. The average SharePoint content farm growth "is greater than 60 percent," said Steven Murphy, CEO of Metalogix, about the trend he sees in customers' SharePoint farms.
SharePoint 2013 Cross-Site Publishing
And what do you do when you have to move all that content to SharePoint 2013? It's a daunting thought for many admins and technology managers.
Murphy, CMO Jignesh Shah, and CTO Trevor Hellebuyck spoke to me recently about how the traditional strategies people use to manage and store SharePoint content aren't scaling to meet the increased growth of SharePoint content. Two of Metalogix's recent product announcements this week address the challenges of content growth and the need for speed in migrating, searching, indexing, and backing up that content.
SharePoint admins, Murphy said, have been outstripped in their capability to meet the needs of knowledge workers due to the sheer amount of content stored in SharePoint. At the same time, customers are looking for better ways to deal with SharePoint, to migrate content, to index it faster, search it faster, and meet availability requirements.
Content Matrix 6 deals with the need to upgrade and migrate SharePoint content while providing organizational capabilities to SharePoint administrators and site owners. Metalogix says that the solution will help move content 20 to 25 times faster than competing solutions.
The solution also takes into account the need to move content while maintaining high fidelity, for example, in the case of workflows. "Customers have a tremendous investment in workflows. They can't even begin to make the transition to 2013 without taking that into account," Murphy said. "We can go from 03 [SharePoint 2003] to 2013 –it doesn't matter about the source version. We can handle it as a high fidelity."
After an organization gets on SharePoint 2013, it needs to keep that content organized. Content Matrix 6 is aimed at eliminating bottlenecks and letting end users find and move content, working within a governance structure that admins have set up.
"Governance becomes even more important," added Shah. "If content is growing at this unprecedented pace--and we have SharePoint farms in terabytes—there's already a strain on centralized control, which is getting people to think about empowering end users. One impediment about governance was 'empower users and lose control.' We are saying you don't have to choose empowering users versus governance. You can set up polices in SharePoint and use Content Matrix to allow users to manage content within the governance policies."
Shah, Murphy, and Hellebuyck, also discussed new features around Metalogix Storage Point 4.0, announcing capabilities that simplify the backup process and reduce SharePoint backup time. "We're able to reduce size of database by up to 95 percent," Hellebuyck said. "Customers can now back up the database in minutes rather than hours." StoragePoint includes granular item-level restore capabilities and automatic BLOB backup.
Say a customer has several TBs of content in SharePoint farms, added Shah. "It takes them eight hours to back up one terabyte. Given the business critical content in SharePoint, just to back up one TB takes time. We're saying 95 percent of your SharePoint content is BLOBS. We shrink it and the rest you can easily back up with out of box tools."
To learn more about Content Matrix and StoragePoint, visit the Metalogix website.
Caroline Marwitz edits and manages web content for SharePoint Pro and writes on SharePoint, Active Directory, security, and virtualization. Follow her on Twitter at SharePoint_Pro and WinCaroline.
