With SharePoint 2010 starting to appear in several customer sites and those customers considering restructuring the site and database architecture.  We thought we should do some experimenting with this.  As such I started creating a site structure and then moving the site collections around to see how it all worked.

Power Shell has become one of the critical tools to any SharePoint developer or administrator.  To get more information check out some of these great references.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee539977.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee806878.aspx

http://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010-cmdlet-reference/

http://powergui.org/entry.jspa?externalID=2812

What I wanted to do is create several different site collections across different content databases.  So Step 1 is create some content databases.  To accomplish this I could use the GUI but that’s no fun, so instead I used PowerShell as follows.

New-SPContentDatabase -Name "Name of database to create" -WebApplication "Name of Web Application to create content database in

I needed to run this a few times as to create enough to really test with.

New-SPContentDatabase -Name Wss_Content_Projects -WebApplication Http://sp2010

New-SPContentDatabase -Name Wss_Content_Departments -WebApplication Http://sp2010>

New-SPContentDatabase -Name Wss_Content_Team -WebApplication Http://sp2010

New-SPContentDatabase -Name Wss_Content_Corporate -WebApplication Http://sp2010

Now I had some content database, but no Sites or Site Collections in them.  In researching this I found many different less than ideal ways of specifying a content database, but I found that there is one PowerShell command with options that pulls this off in one command.  The New-SPSite command has options to specify which content database to create that site in.

New-SPSite -URL "Where to create this site -ContentDatabase "Name of content Database to use" 

-OwnerAlias "Domain\account to use as the owner of the site" -template "Template to use"

So I can run the following commands to create corresponding sites to the above databases 

New-SPSite -URL <a href="http://sp2010/sites/Departments">http://sp2010/sites/Departments</a> -Cont
entDatabase WSS_Content_Departments -OwnerAlias StoragePoint\Administrator -template STS#0

New-SPSite -URL <a href="http://sp2010/sites/Projects">http://sp2010/sites/Projects</a> -Cont
entDatabase WSS_Content_Projects -OwnerAlias StoragePoint\Administrator -template STS#0

New-SPSite -URL <a href="http://sp2010/sites/Corporate">http://sp2010/sites/Corporate</a> -Cont
entDatabase WSS_Content_Corporate -OwnerAlias StoragePoint\Administrator -template STS#0

New-SPSite -URL <a href="http://sp2010/sites/Team">http://sp2010/sites/Team</a> -Cont
entDatabase WSS_Content_Team -OwnerAlias StoragePoint\Administrator -template STS#0

If you don’t want to use the Team Site as a template you can get a good list of these sites and codes to use here
http://www.toddbaginski.com/blog/archive/2009/11/20/which-sharepoint-2010-site-template-is-right-for-me.aspx

At this point I have several different site collections with corresponding content databases.  After I upload some content and ensure all is fully operational I start creating new storage profiles for each content database.  Each profile will utilize Remote Blob Storage (RBS)and will be mapped to 1 endpoint. For StoragePoint this should be considered a very basic configuration as it is not taking advantage of any different scope rules. But for testing this should work just fine.

See below for the Profiles

And the Endpoint they map to

Once all of the content in my sites was fully externalized, its time to start moving the stuff around and see how StoragePoint handles it.  To Move a site into a different database you can use the Move-SPSite PowerShell command.

Move-SPSite “http://Site URL”  -DestinationDatabase "Database name"

So if I wanted to move the Projects site into the Corporate Content Database I would run the following command

Move-SPSite Http://sp2010/Sites/Projects –DestinationDatabase WSS_Content_Corporate

Just in case you were wondering, all these commands worked beautifully, I love PowerShell.   But now for the StoragePoint results.  When I moved a site that was not externalized into a database that was externalized the content of the moved site stays in the database, and it not automatically externalized.  However since this site now falls within a StoragePoint scope any new content that is uploaded is not put into the content database but goes to the specified endpoint 

If I want to to externalize that content I have to run the externalize job.  But GOOD NEWS you can do that too from PowerShell.  Use the  Set-BLOBExternalizationJob command.  This command schedules externalization job for a specified profile.  The job may be run immediately (-RunNow) or at a specified date/time (-JobStartDate).   The command has the following possible parameters

• Profile (p): The name or Id of the profile in which to run the job under. REQUIRED.
• JobStartDate (sdate): The start date/time to run the job unless –RunNow switch is specified.
• NumberOfThreads (threads): Number of threads to run the job with.
• RunNow: If specified (-RunNow), then run the job immediately. Ignores any scheduling options provided.
• EmailDefault: If specified (-EmailDefault), send status email to the default notification group setup in General Settings.
• NotificationEmailOther (email): Other email addresses (not in default notification group) to send status emails to.
• EmailOnErrorOnly: If specified (-EmailOnErrorOnly), then send status email only if an error occurs when running the job.

A quick example Example for scheduling an externalization job to run immediately.
Set-BLOBExternalizationJob –p Departments  –threads 20 –EmailDefault –RunNow

This will run the externalization job on the Departments profile with 20 threads.

In the case where I am moving sites that are already externalized, the content is moved to the new endpoint specified in the new profile associated with the content database that it was moved to. 

For example:

I have 2 Site Collections in 2 databases.

Projects Site Collection in the Projects Database

Corporate Site Collection in the Corporate Database

In this situation the Corporate Database has RBS enabled and is currently externalizing content. The Projects database and site collection are not externalizing at all.  If I run the move site command to move the projects site collection into the Corporate database, all the content will be moved into the Corporate Database.  You will then need to externalize it with the externalization job from central administration or with the above PowerShell commands. 

These PowerShell commands for moving sites into different databases will help organizations better organize and allocate databases and better balance which sites are in which databases.  I hope now that you know StoragePoint already has an ability to completely handle this allows you to move forward comfortably.  One thing to keep in mind is that you need to test this well before you do anything.  If you want to try out StoragePoint and see for yourself what it can do drop us a note at info@storagepoint.com

StoragePoint is in the business of SharePoint Storage Management, this primarily means getting the BLOB’s out of the database and making the content databases smaller and more manageable. However we do see database bloat for other reasons as well, one example of this is auditing. Knowing a few things about this auditing feature will help you prevent some of this bloat.

For those of you who are not that familiar with auditing. Enabling auditing in SharePoint will allow administrators to have a reliable log of what is happening to important content on a site collection by site collection basis. Administrators can configure what gets audited and then regularly run reports on the audit trail. This can be useful to track what happens to content, or even show the activities of particular users. You can run general use reports that show you the activity on the site as a whole

Or go down to the individual document level, by use the new compliance details option in the drop down menu.

Running this will generate a content specific report. This will look like the report below:

This can show you the activity of the specific content you are running the report on.

The Auditing was available in 2007 and continues on largely the same in 2010. The setup is done at the site collection level; see the figures below to see the options.

2007 2010

You can also setup an Information Management Policy on a content type, folder or document.

There are some very important changes in SharePoint 2010. The most significant of which is the added settings for automatic trimming in 2010.

Auditing can be a very useful tool in your SharePoint environment if you do it right. In order to do it right you need to plan out your usage of auditing and ensure you know:

1. What you need to audit,

2. How long you need to keep around the audit data

3. Who will need access to the data?

a. By default the reports are not available to regular members

Once you have this you will also need to plan for the space that you will need for auditing data. This will come in the form of how much space the Audit data takes up in the content database (The audit log information is stored in AuditData table inside of each content database) Estimates on how much space this actually takes up vary, but if left unfettered the log will constantly continue to grow. When left uncontrolled I have seen logs in excess of 30GB. Not regularly trimming the data will cause the content database to grow and this can grow very rapidly. To try to estimate how much space will be taken up use the following formula.

Number of entries per day = E (if auditing downloads this would be number of downloads)

Times

Size Per entry = 2K on average.

Times the number of days of audit data you wish to keep. = D

E x 2K x D

Taking a look at a possible example. Consider that a company would enable auditing of downloading the new HR policy guidelines. They figure this policy would average 125 downloads per day and thus 125 entries per day, with audit data being kept for 180 days.

125 x 2,000 x 180 = 45,000,000 or about 45MB

This does not sound like a huge number, but consider that this formula could represent the download activity of 1 document you would then need to do more math to figure out how much would be in an entire site collection.

In 2007 (after the infrastructure update) you can use the STSADM command TrimAuditLog to delete older entries.

stsadm -o trimauditlog -url <URL name> -date <YYYYMMDD>

-date represents the earliest date for which you want to keep audit data around.

I have seen this stsadm command not work on extremely large audit logs, especially when you specify a very early data and SharePoint has to go through and delete a significant amount of data. For this reason the new additions in SharePoint 2010 are a welcomed addition allowing you to specify dates from the beginning. Unfortunately this stsadm command is not available in SharePoint 2010. (http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2009/10/sharepoint-2010-stsadm-and-powershell.html)

Besides these out of the box tools, there are some communities projects out there that help you with this problem and have built either custom PowerShell scripts or have built programs using the API, a few of these are listed below

http://sharepointpsscripts.codeplex.com/releases/view/21806

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sowmyancs/archive/2008/05/29/create-a-tool-or-interface-to-delete-the-audit-log-from-content-db-of-an-auditing-enabled-sharepoint-site.aspx

http://sharepointauditlog.codeplex.com/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397403(office.12).aspx

As you can see from the above examples you can use SPAuditQuery & SPAuditEntryCollection classes which are in the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll, to build out any code to manage the audit log. Whichever method you choose to use in order to properly manage the audit data the most important factors are:

1. Only audit what you need to audit

a. Auditing more than that can cause your database to grow faster and un-necessarily so.

2. Only keep around the data for as long as you need to

3. Ensure you are auditing for the right reasons.

a. Don’t audit just in case. Make sure you have a valid need to audit. If you don’t you are just adding resource overhead for no reason.

As you can see from above Auditing in SharePoint 2010 can be a very powerful tool in managing a SharePoint environment but as with all things SharePoint if you don’t put some planning in up front and account for maintenance on going you will run into problems later. With StoragePoint you can dramatically reduce your database size and gain ROI from moving items to cheaper tiers of storage it would be a shame to give it all back because of an out of control audit log.

One of the great things about my job is that we get to talk to a wide variety of customers and partners who are using SharePoint in all kinds of different ways. Recently one of these conversations spawned an email thread internally discussing the externalization of video blobs, and how this could possibly affect (positively) video performance. This inspired me to do some testing with the new media web part in 2010 and combining that with Windows Media Services to see what I could pull off.

The Setup

Hyper-V image running

· Windows 2008R2

· SQL 2008

· SharePoint 2010

To start you need to install Windows Media services by following this KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/963697

Make sure you setup media services to be able to use the HTTP protocol as this is the only way you can use the media web part with Media services. (Which I learned from this thread http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010general/thread/bceb1f5d-5cc0-4c93-a999-4db5e7abb1ea)

Once Media services were installed and ready I needed to create a file share that would end up being used to hold all of my streaming videos. For simplicity I just created a Media folder on the C:\ drive and shared it out.

Next up it was time to ensure that Media services used this new share as a publishing point. The easy thing about Media Services is that there is a wizard to walk you through this.

In my case I needed to just create a files publishing point, as it seemed the most logical given the descriptions.

I made it an on demand publishing point so people watching the stream can fast forward etc. Next I selected the directory was the C:\media directory I had setup as my share previously.

The Recap

Now I have a regular old windows share, setup and configured to be a media repository for Media Services. However at this point I have no content or media to take advantage of this. So now it’s time to get some content into this share. This is where the combination of SharePoint and StoragePoint came in.

Step 1 Create an endpoint in StoragePoint that uses the Media Share I created.

Step 2 Create a profile entry that will make sure all WMV files in SharePoint go to the new Media endpoint.

With this being configured I know that anytime someone uploads a WMV to location in SharePoint within the site scope I specified, the BLOB will get written to my Media file share.

Step 3 Upload some WMV files.

Once I do this I can see them show up in my Media services management console.

Since this appears to be all setup, I should be able to add my media web part to a SharePoint site. For some help on this I used “Chaks corner blog”

http://www.chakkaradeep.com/post/SharePoint-2010-Media-Web-Part.aspx

Instead of configuring the web part to use a file “From SharePoint” I used “From Address”

If you use the From SharePoint the media web part will just pull the file out of the list and not take advantage of any streaming. So you need to get a publishing address for one of these files and put that into the web part from address dialogue. To get this simply go to the announce tab in the Media Services management console.

I can get the file name from the main screen of the management console that I need to add to the end of the URL.

Once I know what file I want to use in the web part I add that into the URL

You can now save the page and click play in the web part. Once the video is playing you can verify you are streaming by looking at the Management console Monitor tab.

Using this method you can now:

· Manage your media files in SharePoint.

· Not take the hit of having potentially large media files in the content database

· Be able to take advantage of Media Services and streaming all at the same time!!!!

Setting this all up was quick and easy way to show an additional benefit StoragePoint and doing so in a unique way. What do you think? Would this be of benefit to you? Can you see this working in your environment?

We just finished up with the Minneapolis 2010 launch, which marks the end of the 2010 wave 14 launch tour.  Metalogix was a Platinum sponsor and was in attendance at many of the events.  I went to Chicago, Houston, Washington DC, and Minneapolis.  All locations were good experiences, and we definitely got to have some very good conversations with customers, partners and potentials for both.

Overall I love the excitement and interest in SharePoint, from my conversations i had at the events it appears that many projects are getting underway to either investigate or implement.

One of the best parts of being able to talk to so many different people is hearing the different approaches and reasons why people are using SharePoint. We heard everything from repositories of scanned purchase orders, and records using products from  Knowledgelake to the sharing of video files and using the new media web part.  A common reason revolved around the social aspects for collaboration that SharePoint 2010 now offers in abundance.  I also heard a fair number of companies working on the idea that SharePoint can be used as a host for both their extranet and their Internet presence.

With the launch series being combined with Visual Studio 2010, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 there was still a fair number of people in attendance who were not “SharePoint people” as shocking as that may be I do think that getting perspectives from people who had not yet started using SharePoint and were coming at the situation from very different perspectives added value. 

During the event I got to sit in and listen to "The SharePoint Dude" talk about what they are doing out at Penson.  They are seeking to better enable their users through “portlets”, (SharePoint based applications and processes).  It is tremendously encouraging to hear about people using SharePoint in interesting ways.  I love to hear about people really getting excited about the power that SharePoint can have on your users, using SharePoint and empowering them to do more, do their work better and be more efficient.

As for the The Minneapolis event itself it was the best one that I attended.  The event was extremely well run, had a FANTASTIC venue it also appeared to be the largest crowd of them all.  The Minneapolis SharePoint community is strong and active one of the better ones i have seen.  The user group leadership should be very proud of what they have been able to build there.  Visit their site here http://www.sharepointmn.com/default.aspx  They even had a representative (Wes Preston)in attendance to answer attendees questions and help them get involved in community.  Great job guys

Along the lines of the “local community” One of the most surprising experiences i have had is the dramatic difference between the regional SharePoint communities.  Having presented at or been in attendance at a fair number of the of the technical user groups it seems to me that the SharePoint communities seem to have the largest differences region by region.  Minneapolis in my experience has been one of the best.   Some other really good ones are:

• Denver
• Dallas
• Houston (in the winter :))
• Indianapolis
• New York
• Charlotte

Hello again all.  In a previous adventure blog i wrote about what StoragePoint is and how it deals with blobs.  One thing i did not make clear is that StoragePoint does so through a technology called External BLOB Storage (EBS) which is exposed by SharePoint 2007, as well as the forthcoming SharePoint 2010.   So that is the basics of it.  Now onto the question for this entry….

I have heard talk about a new feature in SharePoint 2010 called Remote Blob Storage (RBS), how will this change the StoragePoint story?    There are lots of little aspects of this that may change things slightly but for now we will just keep this basic. 

The first thing I found out was that RBS is a new feature that is made available by SQL 2008 and has nothing to do with SharePoint 2007 or 2010.  However it is fully supported in SharePoint 2010.    As you read before EBS is a SharePoint technology and is implemented at a very low level in SharePoint actually just above the SQL layer.  Just before the BLOB is passed to SQL you can have an EBS provider take the file and put it externally.

The basic problem with just taking RBS as it is out of the box is that there is no management of what data goes to which location.  With an out of the box File Stream provider your only option is the local file system.  By itself there is no intelligence to the process, no context etc.  I can see many organizations wanting to pick and chose different locations for storage (as I pointed out in the Tiered Storage blog)  Filling this type of need is exactly where things clicked together for me as this is where StoragePoint comes in.  StoragePoint will register as an RBS provider much as we did with the EBS provider.  We can then add that level of management and intelligence to RBS.

Obviously RBS is there, and there is a good amount of information out there documenting how to use it.  So you could go write your own provider and I am sure there will be some that will but keep in mind the level of criticality that this type of code will have.  This will be responsible for handling 1000’s if not millions of files some of those VERY critical in nature.  I personally would struggle with doing so, I am not sure how many others may agree with that, let me know your thoughts i would love to hear.

So what does all this mean?  The short answer is that the basics are the same, if you want intelligent blob externalization and don't want to spend a ton of time writing something yourself.  You need StoragePoint, for SharePoint 2007 we use the SharePoint EBS provider.  With an upcoming release we will give you the choice of using EBS or RBS.

And now for some further learning check out the following links

http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/03/17/sql-server-2008-and-unstructured-data.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/wp-sql-2008-manage-unstructured.aspx

https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032370324

http://nevertalkwhenyoucannod.typepad.com/nevertalk/2008/11/sharepoint-archiving-3---ebs-vs-rbsthe-ultimate-grudge-match.html

One Natural follow up question for me was: Since we are using out of the box exposed functionality do we do anything to SharePoint that causes support issues?

I am happy to say that the answer is no.  Nothing that StoragePoint does will affect the supportability of your environment.  We have worked closely with Microsoft on this as evidenced by the ISV award we won at the SharePoint conference. http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/news.aspx#25

We will continue to work with Microsoft to ensure everything we do is supportable and done the best way possible.

Well I hope you are learning something from my blogs as I try to learn as well. Let me know if you have questions so that i can research those and make them part of my journey into StoragePoint

We last left off my learning adventure talking about the built in security features of StoragePoint.  Today i wanted to continue down my list of questions, and start with a term I heard a lot about when starting off my research. 

Question 5 What is “Tiered Storage” and how does StoragePoint help me take advantage of it?

One of the easiest definitions i found was:

Tiered storage is the assignment of different categories of data to different types of storage media in order to reduce total storage cost. Categories may be based on levels of protection needed, performance requirements, frequency of use, and other considerations.

The definition comes from http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci1028962,00.html

At the core of this leveraging a tiered storage model is the idea that you should classify your data storage needs and that assign each class of data to a Tier of storage.

As an example this relationship if i am a typical organization and have a internal public file share where people just throw regular old files on.  There would usually be no need to have this on a high end SAN at a cost of $15/GB that is redundant, with regular snapshots and nightly backup.   Rather they would typically place this type of file share on a simple DAS setup. Which would be both cheaper to acquire and require less maintenance overhead.

However, the requirements for your more critical data, such as financial records, legal documents, and customer data etc are more significant.  The loss of these items could have a significant impact, as such the storage media and storage management of these system changes the equation.  At least it does in a regular file storage situation.

Enter in SharePoint, a tremendous leap forward in portal, collaboration and content management for Microsoft.  People have begun adopting it in droves and have made it one of the most successful Microsoft Products ever.  The effect this has had on file storage and in relation “Tiered Storage” has fascinating pieces to it.  The architecture of SharePoint is heavily reliant on SQL Server which is a data storage component often placed on a Tier 1 level of storage.  Yet common SharePoint architectures will not separate this data out into different web apps, site collections of the like.  Many times disparate classes of data can reside in the same site.  Yet all are stored in the same database and often on this expensive tier 1 storage environment.   Many administrators do not even know that there are solutions out there to help this situation.  What is needed here is the ability to have SQL still sit on a mission critical level storage environment yet move the actual files to a different tier if needed based on their classification.

That’s where the link between StoragePoint and Tiered storage really hit home for me.  I can take advantage of SharePoint that helps me with collaboration and document management at the same time i can still have more granular control over how my storage is used through storage Tiers.  I can have one Site Collection point to a Tier 1 type of storage location, and another Site Collection point to a Tier 2, or even a cloud based off premise storage. I can even get more granular than that by specifying different Filters based on file size and or type

This is just the beginning, the shear number of possibilities are endless.  As the product and the market evolve we can bring more and more options to the customer base.  So stay tuned.

I think that question was an important one, and took some space to address so lets leave it at that for today, and start fresh again next time.

As always if you have comments or questions please let me know,

As  you probably already know Microsoft is about to launch SharePoint, Office and Visual Studio 2010.  This is a big deal for not only Microsoft but many of Microsoft's partners who have been in various early adopter and beta programs over the past year+

We are very proud to tell you that Metalogix StoragePoint is going to be participating as a Platinum Sponsor of the Microsoft 2010 US Launch Event Series.

We are very honored to be chosen as a Platinum Sponsor and excited to participate in such a big event.   You can find out more about the series of events by going to the event pages here:

http://www.microsoft.com/business/2010events/default.aspx

If you want to sign up and attend one of the launch events you can do so here:

https://microsoft.crgevents.com/Register2010/Content/Event_Selection.aspx

We will have a presence at the following locations:

Chicago	April 29th
New York	May 13th
Washington DC	May 18th
Dallas	May 18th
Los Angeles	May 18th
Atlanta	May 20th
Houston	May 20th
San Francisco	May 20th
Detroit	May 25th
Philadelphia	May 27th
Seattle	May 27th
Minneapolis	May 27th

Rob D’Oria, the Metalogix StoragePoint CTO, will also be speaking and participating in a panel discussion at the Dallas event.  So that event is going to be extra exciting.  There will be a vendor area at each event, so please come by say hello, and ask us about what we are doing to enhance your SharePoint 2010 experience. 

To further highlight just how much is going on for this launch the SharePoint community has also been helping to build out the excitement and are participating in a grass roots level setting up their own virtual launch events.   For more information on that check out the following links:

Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=105372942833404#wall_posts

Eventbrite to register
http://sharepointlaunch.eventbrite.com/

Check here more more information as it develops
http://splaunch.wikispaces.com/

Before I started at Metalogix on the StoragePoint team I sat down and wrote down the questions I had about the technology.  Then i could work to get answers to each of them. My plan is to document my questions and their answers in a series of blog posts over the course of the next couple weeks. So if you want to learn more about StoragePoint stay tuned to this blog.  For this blog post we will dive into my first few questions then in subsequent blog posts we will continue on with more.

Question 1. Give me the quick elevator pitch of StoragePoint.

StoragePoint is a single solution that makes SharePoint® more economical to operate, more secure, more quickly and easily recoverable from disasters, and more compliant while improving performance and end user experience, by keeping the BLOB's out of SQL.

Apparently this is a good thing because the below link states.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb802812.aspx

“Although Microsoft SQL Server is a highly efficient resource manager for structured data in a SharePoint content database, a large proportion of data files are represented as unstructured binary files that is, binary large object (BLOB) data files. SQL Server offers less of a gain for binary data than for structured data, so your server farm might gain cost savings by using an external data store to contain your binary data files.”

Question 2. StoragePoint is all about the “BLOB” What is a “BLOB”, can you explain it to me?

A “BLOB” is, a binary large object (BLOB)

For SharePoint this is essentially the files that are all stored in SharePoint and as a result stored in SQL because of SharePoint’s architecture and reliance on the SQL database. By default here is how this process would work without an externalization provider.

“The semantics of BLOB storage routed the binary data stream associated with a SharePoint file to the Microsoft SQL Server content database, which it shared with the site's structured data. Under that scenario, when you invoked a Save command on the SharePoint file, a parser in the Save path recognized the Save command and promoted a parcel of metadata out of the file stream. Then the metadata, along with the BLOB associated with the file, was stored in the SQL Server content database.”

This text taken from (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb862195.aspx)

Now I (and hopefully you) have a good idea of what a blob is, and does, and maybe even a glimpse of why externalizing this blob has really begun to win favor.

Now that I have the basics out of the way I started getting into some more specific questions. Since I have a security background I started to think security.

Question 3. What affect does StoragePoint have on the security of my SharePoint environment?

I was excited to find that there is a very simple answer to this question.

The answer is NONE

The externalized files are accessed only by the SharePoint Service account. You do not need to add special permissions to them or the share they are accessed on. SharePoint handles the security trimming just as if they were still in the database, no difference. According to the FAQ I read…

“StoragePoint works off of a single service account to store and retrieve externalized content BLOBs, so the remote BLOB store can be locked down to restrict unauthorized access. Additionally, a StoragePoint storage profile can be configured to compress and/or encrypt the content.”

This answer led me to my next question.

Question 4. What are my options for encrypting the content?

StoragePoint and also encrypt content as it externalizes it. This encryption is seamless to the users of the system. StoragePoint optionally encrypts the content with AES (128 or 256 bit)

This encryption happens on the Web Front End (WFE) so the contents will be encrypted in transit to the new blob storage location. If you also add in a good SSL implementation for your WFE you now have solidly encrypted traffic from your users all the way back to storage and back. That’s quite a benefit in my eyes, so it was a nice little surprise I did not know about going in.

There are lots more questions and answers coming, but no need to overwhelm you. In the next couple days I will continue documenting the adventure so visit often and keep reading.

If you have thoughts, suggestions, and or questions please feel free to email me.

Thanks!

Hello thank you for coming and welcome to my new blog home. As you may or may not know, this marks week 1 for my new job here at Metalogix as the StoragePoint product manager. I would like to take a few moments and introduce myself as well as give you an idea of what you can expect from me going forward.

StoragePoint was recently acquired by Metalogix, in an effort to continually add value to their SharePoint based product lines.  It is precisely this that drove me to take this position. I was formerly the community and social media manager for K2. K2 is a company heavily reliant on the success of SharePoint and a company continually extending the value proposition of the SharePoint platform for those that have chosen to adopt it.

Coming to Metalogix is a huge opportunity to not only continue to work in the great community that is SharePoint but also through that participation and interaction to continually evolve and better the Metalogix/StoragePoint offerings.  Continually seeking to align them with the needs of those who rely on SharePoint as a critical piece of their business.

So let’s talk a little bit about my role here

The intent of my role is to act as the product team’s liaison to our marketing and sales teams as well as our customer base and partners. I am charged with gaining greater insight into how our customers are using StoragePoint and using that information to help shape our product roadmap. I also hope to use my community-building expertise to drive greater awareness of what we do and, more importantly, how we do it.

So now on to some final, and possibly more important business. What can you expect from me ant this blog?

I plan to blog about many issues, but my primary focus is going to be SharePoint. In the coming weeks, I plan to blog about my on boarding process and document my experiences as I seek to learn more about StoragePoint, Metalogix, and the market in which we play and all the things I discover. Hopefully you will be able to take something away from this even if you are not trying to learn more about StoragePoint itself. I still plan to be involved with presenting at conferences, and other SharePoint events. As such from time to time you will find those materials here.

So I would like to leave you with a bit more information about who I am. I am a father to 4 great kids, and a husband to a far too understanding wife named Sara. When I am not digging into some technology you can probably find me playing with my kids, watching my son Carter at baseball, or my daughter Leah-rose at Gymnastics. I also have re-discovered my interests in reading. Right now I am knee deep in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King.