The StoragePoint team is pleased to announce the release of the StoragePoint PowerShell Extension Library for SharePoint 2007 and 2010.  This free add-on for StoragePoint 3.0 gives SharePoint admins the ability to manage endpoints, profiles, and jobs/agents within existing or newly created PowerShell scripts. 

The library comes with a command reference (both PDF and within PowerShell via Get-Help) that contains several sample scripts along with a sample script file for creating storage profiles for each site collection, content database, or web application in your farm.  It highlights the use of several of the StoragePoint cmdlets and is also very useful when setting up StoragePoint on a new farm. 

Profile and Endpoint Management

• Add-Endpoint
• Add-Profile
• Add-EndpointToProfile
• Get-EndpointExists
• Get-Endpoint
• Get-AllEndpoints
• Get-Profile
• Get-AllProfiles
• Get-AllEndpointsByProfile

Agent/Job Scheduling

• Set-OrphanBLOBCleanupJob
• Set-BLOBExteranlizationJob
• Set-BLOBRecallJob
• Set-BLOBMigrateJob
• Set-ArchivingAgingJob
• Set-ArchivingMetadataJob
• Set-ArchivingVersioningJob

BLOB Information and Migration

• Get-BLOB
• Get-AllBLOBs
• Move-BLOB

Examples of what you can do with the PowerShell Extensions...

Add a new storage endpoint
Add-Endpoint -epn MainEndpoint2 -adn FileSystem -conn "PATH=\\Server\blobShare\EP2;AUDITDELETE=False;BUFFERSIZE=8192;SHREDONDELETE=False;"

Take storage endpoint offline
$endpoint = Get-Endpoint -ep MainEndpoint1
$endpoint.Status = 0 
$endpoint.Save()

Displaying all endpoints meeting a certain criteria
$endpoints = Get-AllEndpoints | Where-Object {$_.Name -Like "*Test*"}
ForEach ($endpoint in $endpoints) {$endpoint.Name + " : " + $endpoint.Connection}

Creating multiple profiles using the same endpoint
# Add the common endpoint
Add-Endpoint –epn "Common Endpoint 1" –adn "FileSystem" –conn "path=\\NAS\COMMON"
# Get web app - there are many other ways to do this.
$site = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://spsite")
$webapp = $site.WebApplication
# Iterate through all site collections in web app
foreach($sc in $webapp.Sites)
{
  $startfolder = $sc.RootWeb.Title
  $profilename = $startfolder + " Profile"
  Write-Output "Creating profile for: $startfolder"
  # Create profile
  Add-Profile –pn $profilename –ptype SiteCollection –sid $sc.ID.ToString() –eid "Common Endpoint 1" -EndpointStartFolder $startfolder
  # Cleanup
  $sc.Dispose()
}
# Cleanup
$site.Dispose()

Displaying all BLOB files associated with a SharePoint document
$blobs = Get-BLOB –doc "http://spsite/documents/123.tif"
ForEach ($b in $blobs) {$b.Endpoint.Name + " : " + $b.FilePath}

New Farm Setup Script
FarmProfileSetup.ps1 (2.68 kb)

In addition the the PowerShell Extension Library, we've also released our StoragePoint API for Version 3.  In addition to providing a .NET API for configuring StoragePoint and managing remoted BLOBs it also serves as a reference for the objects returned by some of the PowerShell cmdlets.  The PowerShell Extension Library or API Reference can be downloaded from our Support site under Downloads > StoragePoint > 3.0, with the PowerShell library in the PowerShell folder and the API reference in the Documentation folder.  If you are not a customer and wish to test out the PowerShell extensions or APIs as part of your evaluation of StoragePoint then please send a request to support@storagepoint.com for download instructions.  Once you have the bits you just add our library to your PowerShell session using the Add-PSSnapIn cmdlet.  To ensure that the library is loaded on subsequent loads of the PowerShell console simply add the Add-PSSnapIn command to your profile.  See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb613488(VS.85).aspx for a reference on managing PowerShell profiles.  Once the library has been added you can use the cmdlets to configure StoragePoint or management BLOBs.

We will continue to expand the PowerShell Extension Library and our APIs in future releases with the goal of creating an entirely "headless" installation and configuration experience.  Among other things, this will enable partners to OEM or bundle StoragePoint with their own offering and instrument the installation and configuration of the solution without exposing our tooling.  If you find as you use the PowerShell extensions or APIs that something is missing for your use case then please don't hesitate to leave a comment or shoot us an email at support@storagepoint.com.

The Metalogix StoragePoint team is pleased to announce the 3rd major release of our SharePoint Storage Management solution.  This version marks a substantial upgrade in SharePoint storage management functionality over our own V2 releases and the BLOB Offloading, archiving, and appliance solutions on the market today.  The tiered storage and hierarchical storage management (HSM) capabilities alone give SharePoint customers a very compelling reason (i.e. “Storage Economics”) to move all their content in SharePoint.  Combine that with Metalogix’s expanding suite of migration tools and a SharePoint customer can confidently move their content from expensive, but most often underutilized legacy content management platforms and unmanaged content sources like fileshares to SharePoint. 

Chris Geier, StoragePoint Product Manager, and I talking about how StoragePoint is "blazing a new trail" in SharePoint Storage Management.

StoragePoint is much more than the entry level BLOB offloading solutions out there.  It doesn't break SharePoint or bust your IT budget like the big box archiving solutions out there with their legacy and unsupported stubbing methods.  And it doesn't present the ongoing support and maintenance challenges associated with hardware, especially hardware from a startup that hasn't established whether or not it's a viable business.  Don't take my word for it...consult our own SharePoint Storage Management Mystical Square.  The "Square" is obviously our own creation and we think it's a pretty fair assessment of the space, but you can obviously decide for yourself.

Storagepoint.com has also been updated with new content, so please check it out for more information.  We'll be pushing out additional content and making some other announcements in the coming days and weeks, so stay tuned.

You can register to attend a live overview presentation and demo of StoragePoint 3.0 every Thursday at 11:00am Eastern.  Ping us at info@storagepoint.com if you want to request a demo/presentation for another day or time.

You can also view recorded 3.0 demos on our YouTube Channel:

• SharePoint Version 3 Installation and Configuration
• StoragePoint Version 3 Basic Introduction
• StoragePoint 3.0 Archiving Functionality

Mark Brazeau (...the guy that started BlueThread with me almost 4 years ago) and the one who runs the StoragePoint business unit here at Metalogix got a new toy (...never seen anybody so excited about a camera before) early last week and wanted to try it out.  He's been wanting to get me and Chris on camera talking about our offering and how we see things for a while now and while I've been open to the idea the opportunity didn't present itself until last week when Chris was in town from Chicago...cue Mark and his new camera.  The result was some very lightly staged, but completely unscripted talk between Chris and I about what we do and how we do it. 

We do get into our thinking and approach more than most ISVs would, so some that view these will ultimately proclaim, "What are they thinking?". One of our sales guys saw a couple of these clips yesterday and wondered "is it wise to publish our playbook", to which I replied "you can have the other team's playbook, but if you don't have the talent to execute it then it's just a book full of meaningless X's and O's".  Another asked why we were giving up the secret sauce, to which I replied "everyone knows it's Thousand Island Dressing".  I firmly believe that the StoragePoint wanna-be's out there don't have teams good enough to execute our playbook and/or can't mix-up a good batch of the secret sauce even if they had the recipe...I can make a mean New York style pizza and can give you the recipe for that, but if you don't use San Marzano tomatoes in the sauce and you don't take enough time to knead the dough or let it proof then it's not going to be good.  It would be like replacing .NET with Java or Focus with "We've got an App for that"...it's not going to be good eats. Besides, these other guys have all used creative means to get access to our bits and copy-cat our features. Some have even gone as far as copying content from our website, verbatim, to their own.  We can spend a bunch of time trying to stop them from copying and stealing from us or we can spend that time earning the innovation award we got at SPC09...making sure they are always at least one reverse-engineered release behind us.  When y'all see StoragePoint 3.0 next Monday it will be clear where we're investing our time.

So onto the videos...

We loaded the videos into a playlist on YouTube.  You can view the playlist here: http://bit.ly/at5W5I

You can play the entire playlist starting with the 1st video here: http://bit.ly/9uNM9k

StoragePoint 3.0 Information

• Contact us at info@storagepoint.com if you have any questions or would like to request access to the Release Candidate.  We will not issue pre-release trials without full corporate contact information (Name, Title, Company, Address, Phone Number, and Email Address).
• Attend one of our weekly StoragePoint 3.0 Overview sessions.
• Follow us on Twitter for updates on new content (videos, whitepapers, blogs, etc.).
• Find us on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/StoragePoint
• Check storagepoint.com on June 14th for our new site.

Here is the transcript from the Live Q&A session Chris Geier and I conducted with Microsoft at Noon EDT today:

Q: Is your storage solution in the cloud, onsite or both?
A: Both. We offer adapters/connectors for both on-premise (i.e. EMC Centera) and clound-based (i.e. Windows Azure) storage platforms.

Q: How does StoragePoint reduce the size of SharePoint databases?
A: By offloading the content BLOBs normally stored in the content databases using SharePoint EBS or SQL RBS interfaces.

Q: If I use StoragePoint to offload BLOBs and then I find that I need to restore from a backup, is it possible that my SharePoint server will get confused. For example, I restore a document item from the DB and it contains old info about where the BLOB is stored.
A: No, StoragePoint handles this scenario using our breadcrumb feature. Any time a BLOB is moved we leave a breadcrumb behind that points to the new location.

Q: Can I setup archive rules for certain pieces of content to move them to different storage locations?
A: Yes. You can setup aging, retained version, and metadata change rules to move content to another endpoint, the idea being that I`m continually moving BLOBs to less expensive tiers of storage as it becomes less relevant.

Q: Does this integrate cleanly with SharePoints "search" functionality to allow quick search of BLOB assets?
A: Yes, the overall user/SharePoint experience is identical for all perspectives including Search. You will find that the speed of crawl and indexing is actually much faster. Which is a common reason why StoragePoint is a consderation for many of our customers.

Q: are there decision criteria for using RBS over EBS. Assuming you can use either one? or both?
A: EBS is deprecated (...still supported) in SharePoint 2010, so we would recommend RBS if this is a clean install on 2010. If you are migration from WSS3/MOSS 2007 with StoragePoint in place, you can upgrade with EBS and then migrate to RBS at your leisure.

Q: How are you positioning StoragePoint against the free RBS FileStream provider that comes with RBS?
A: The RBS FILESTREAM provider does not come with RBS...it is a separate download. We don`t really position ourselves against it per se because it`s not a comparable offering. It is a very limited BLOB offloading capability that has all kinds of limitations. Here`s a blog post with more details: http://blog.storagepoint.com/post.aspx?id=280174ab-f0ce-4348-aabb-2081630484c9

Q: How would your product affect our SharePoint replication strategy?
A: That is an important consideration when selecting a BLOB externalization product. You have to be sure that the BLOB reference that is left in place of the BLOB itself does not point to a hard location thus making taking advantage of replication more difficult. In the case of StoragePoint we store a reference to what we call the Storage Profile. In your replicated Farm all you would have to do is modify the location that the storage profile points to and that replicated farm would be fully functional. Here`s a blog post with more details: http://blog.storagepoint.com/post.aspx?id=57eb05cb-d0ff-4f71-b2f1-dd360999ebef

Q: Do you have an ROI calcuator or other metrics I can share at my company to sell adoption internally?
A: We do have a tiered storage ROI calculator on our site: http://www.storagepoint.com/roicalculator.aspx. You can also download our BLOBulator, which well estimate how much smaller your content databases will be with StoragePoint in place: http://www.storagepoint.com/product.aspx?tab=6

Q: What`s the difference betwee RBS FileStream and StoragePoint?
A: RBS FILESTREAM is a very basic RBS provider that uses the built-in FILESTREAM capabilities of SQL 2008. It`s biggest limitation is it`s requirement that the BLOB store be local to the SQL server. More on positioning in this blog post: http://blog.storagepoint.com/post.aspx?id=280174ab-f0ce-4348-aabb-2081630484c9.

Q: I`ve read blog articles about configuring RBS. Which of the configuration steps do I still need to do in order to use RBS with StoragePoint?
A: None. StoragePoint handles all the RBS configuration tasks under the covers when you create a storage profile.

Q: What if I need to use compliant storage like EMC Centera?
A: We have two adapters that support ECM Centera...one that uses the traditional RPC layer and a 2nd that uses SNIA`s XAM standard.

Q: How often do you upgrade your solution? Is it in cadence with Microsoft`s releases?
A: We work to have 2 major releases per year, and service packs as needed. We strive to continually add features and functionality to our product. Some of this is based on customer and partner feedback and others based on being able to take advantage of new Microsoft functionality such as that in SharePoint 2010.

Q: What`s the differece between StoragePoint archiving and other archiving solutions?
A: Probably the biggest difference is our use of EBS and RBS as the BLOB remoting mechanism. Most of the traditional archiving solutions use some sort of stub or HTML placeholder after they pull the BLOB out of the database, so the end user experience is affected and OOB and 3rd party functionality is effected (i.e. doing a SPFile.OpenBinaryStream would grab the stub, not the BLOB).

Q: What`s the impact to SharePoint performance after StoragePoint is installed?
A: This is a YMMV type question, so I will never answer it in absolutes, but I will say that you can expect performance to be as good or slighter better than leaving the BLOBs in the database. If the BLOB stores are on high performant storage and close to the WFEs you can expect significanty better performance, especially on larger files and with bulk operations (i.e. crawling content).

Q: Is my Backup strategy different when I use StoragePoint?
A: I would say your backup strategy "MAY" be different. However this is because you now have more options at your disposal when planning out your strategy, for example, you will have significanly smaller databases which now makes SQL replication more appealing. The only different step that needs to be added is the consideration of where your BLOB`s are and how they are accounted for in the backup and restore. We are working on a whitepaper that addresses all your backup restore and Disaster recovery needs. This should be published soon.

Q: I read the blogs... are you saying the StoragePoint will place content on a new tier of storage automatically once it reaches a certain level (ala 95pct)?
A: You can configure multiple endpoints (blob store locations) per profile, so you can configure endpoints to be taken offline as they reach some freespace threshold. At that point, the next configured endpoint would be used...and so on.

Q: Can I pick a specific list(s) to be externalized with StoragePoint and RBS?
A: Yes, you can get as granual as specific lists, or you can also specify content types, sites, or even externalize based on changes in Metadata.

Q: Our company has 50TBs of content- what chellenges does that create with StoragePoint?
A: I don`t see challenges here, I see opportunities. If you follow Microsoft sizing recommendations for content dbs (...and I`ll be the 1st to say this is a GUIDELINE and not an absolute) you would need 500 content dbs to manage that much content. If you assume a modest BLOB offloading yield of 90pct you would only need 50, but again the 100GB recommendation is soft and has been increased to 300GB in 2010. Database size aside, the storage cost savings is probably the single biggest benefit here. You could easily save $1m on storage costs by offloading 90pct of the data to a secondary tier of storage.

Q: Will having StoragePoint in my 2007 affect my upgrade to 2010
A: Yes, but the affect will be a positive one. We have found that because the database is not bogged down with BLOB`s that the actual upgrade process is much quicker. A primary reason for this is that the table structure for BLOB storage changes from 2007 to 2010. As such all BLOB`s need to be re-organized during the upgrade. This can be a time consuming process. Without the BLOB`s in the database this process is significantly faster.

Q: In your Blog you refer to "intelligent archiving" what do you mean by this?
A: Our archiving capability is intelligent in the sense that StoragePoint makes decisions based on the rules you defined...no user or admin interaction is required to archive content once the rules are established. Frankly, the "intelligent archiving" tag is more marketing spin than anything else...I would refer to it as "active archiving" more than anything else. Traditional archiving solutions are more passive in how they archive content.

Q: If I pick a specific list with content to externalize with StoragePoint and RBS - what happens to the rest of the blobs (from other lists\sites) in that database?
A: If the storage profile is using EBS and no other endpoints are configured or valid it will go into the content db. If the storage profile is using RBS you will be required to provide at least one unfiltered endpoint for BLOBs to go into in the case they don`t meet the criteria of a filtered endpoint.

Feel free to contact us via our general info box (...noted below) or myself (rdoria@metalogix.net) or chris (cgeier@metalogix.net) directly or post a comment below if you missed the session and have questions.

StoragePoint 3.0 Information

• Contact us at info@storagepoint.com if you have any questions or would like to request access to the Release Candidate.  We will not issue pre-release trials without full corporate contact information (Name, Title, Company, Address, Phone Number, and Email Address).
• Attend one of our weekly StoragePoint 3.0 Overview sessions.
• Follow us on Twitter for updates on new content (videos, whitepapers, blogs, etc.).
• Find us on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/StoragePoint
• Check storagepoint.com on June 14th for our new site.

This is personally one of my favorites for two reasons, 1) the absolute opposite is true and 2) StoragePoint has been architected from the beginning to handle this.  I love having the replication (or how do I create a replica?) conversation with customers and partners because they are always shocked how easy it is to do this with StoragePoint in place.  I regularly have a hypothetical conversation with a SharePoint admin or IT management type around the following scenario: We regularly take content from our production environment and refresh one or more of our pre-production environments for development, testing, or staging purposes. How do I move the content databases without them pointing back to my production BLOB stores?  The answer to this question is simple with StoragePoint.  It helps to understand that the BLOB References we hand back to SharePoint and that are stored in the content DB contain to pieces of information, one is an Endpoint ID (reference to the physical location of the BLOB store) and the BLOB ID (reference to the relative location of the BLOB within the BLOB store).  This de-coupling or abstraction of the physical location from the BLOB reference allows us to point the BLOB refs to a different BLOB store by simply changing the physical location of the BLOB store within the Endpoint definition.  So an admin can attach the content db from the prod environment into their non-prod environment (...or do a backup and restore), simply copy the prod BLOB store to another location, and change the Endpoint entry in StoragePoint to reflect the new non-prod BLOB store location.  Done!  No need to re-synthesize (...re-build) BLOB References.  No need to internalize and then re-externalize content.  This same "shallow copy" methodology can be used for other replication scenarios, whether they be batch processed or real-time.  You're just moving the list item information along with the BLOB Reference from a SharePoint perspective and using Windows DFS or some other replication capability to move the BLOBs.  The DR site has the same Endpoint definitions, the path (FileSystem adapter) or accesspoint/bucket/container/tenant (cloud Adapter) of each Endpoint definition is just different.

If you're looking at other solutions and replication is important to you, make sure they don't store the physical location of the BLOB in the BLOB reference because it will unnecessarily complicate or restrict certification and disaster recovery tasks if they do.  This seemed like the obvious architectural approach to us, but based on feedback from some of our customers and partners that evaluated other solutions along with StoragePoint it apparently is not that obvious a choice.  I tend to chalk it up to us being focused on delivering a best of breed solution that handles a wide array of real-world usage scenarios elegantly and simply rather than just flinging something out there in an effort to be all things SharePoint.

There will be more on this in a DR whitepaper we are releasing along with the RTM of StoragePoint 3.0 on June 14th.

StoragePoint 3.0 Information

• Contact us at info@storagepoint.com if you have any questions or would like to request access to the Release Candidate.  We will not issue pre-release trials without full corporate contact information (Name, Title, Company, Address, Phone Number, and Email Address).
• Attend one of our weekly StoragePoint 3.0 Overview sessions.
• Follow us on Twitter for updates on new content (videos, whitepapers, blogs, etc.).
• Find us on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/StoragePoint
• Check storagepoint.com on June 14th for our new site.

I've heard other vendors in the SharePoint storage space (i.e. BLOB Offloading, Archiving, and Appliances) claim that you can't run EBS and RBS at the same...I heard some folks from the self-proclaimed leader of all things SharePoint declare this a few days ago.  Those claims show a fundamental lack of understanding of how those technologies work and how they are implemented within the SharePoint OM.  Additionally, if you couldn't have them implemented simultaneously, how would you migrate from EBS to RBS once EBS is no longer supported (NOTE:  EBS is deprecated in SharePoint 2010)?  You going to take your farm down while you perform some complicated and long-running upgrade/migration process or worse internalize all the content that was externalized with EBS, unplug the EBS provider, start associating instances of an RBS provider with all your content DBs, and then externalize the content again?  Neither one of those options sound real appetizing or even viable, but that's what you're left with if you in fact can't run the two technologies side-by-side.

The fact of the matter is you can run them side-by-side.  The folks out there saying you can't do this simply do not know what they're talking about and to be perfectly frank there's a lot of that going around these days...and not just on this specific topic (...lot's of noise about how stuff works and how you should be scared of these technologies, but not a lot of facts to back it up...I feel a rant coming on, so I'll stop there).  The misstatements from folks that should know is at the same time amusing and frightening.  We get a quick laugh about it within our product team, but then you talk to a customer that is fearful about implementing the technology because they've been told there is no simple upgrade path or the vendor doesn't have a good answer and it's not funny any longer.

So here is our position on this topic: I can declare with absolute certainty that the two technologies can run side-by-side...we demonstrate this pretty much every day to somebody.  And as far as migrating from EBS to RBS, we've implemented a shallow copy migration capability into our 3.0 product.  So let's take the following scenario.  I'm customer X and I've implemented StoragePoint 2.2 in my MOSS 2007 farm and externalized all my content.  I'm now contemplating an upgrade to MSS 2010 and want to use RBS instead of EBS once I'm there because I'm concerned about the future supportability of EBS.  Here's how you would accomplish that with StoragePoint:

1. Upgrade from MOSS 2007 to MSS 2010
2. Upgrade from StoragePoint 2.2 to StoragePoint 3.0
3. At this point everything works and content is retrievable using EBS, which as previously noted is deprecated, but still supported, in 2010...DEPRECATED does not equal UNSUPPORTED.
4. Create Content DB scoped Storage Profile(s) in StoragePoint that "cover" the existing EBS profiles.  So if you have a bunch of site collection scoped EBS profiles, creating a Content DB scoped RBS profile will "cover" all the site collections within it.  If you have web application scoped EBS profiles, you would need to create a Content DB scoped RBS storage profile for each Content DB in the web application if you wanted to "cover" all the EBS-externalized content within that web application.
5. Run the Externalize job on the new Content DB scoped profiles.  A shallow copy migration between EBS and RBS will occur, transferring control of the externalized BLOBs to RBS.  Users can access the content while this is happening, no downtime has to be planned or incurred.
6. That's it!  No painful or long-running process.  No down-time.  No re-allocation of storage to account of content being internalized.

If you're looking at BLOB Remoting solutions and are concerned about 2007 to 2010 upgrades or future supportability ask the question..."how do you upgrade from 2007 to 2010?" and/or "how do I migrate from EBS to RBS?".  I would also encourage you to consider yourself a temporary resident of the fine state of Missouri and say "OK, SHOW ME!".  And with that in mind, I don't expect you to just take my written word for it, so we'll have a short video demo of this up on our YouTube Channel in the coming weeks...as we get closer to RTM of StoragePoint 3.0 on June 14th. 

StoragePoint 3.0 Information

• Contact us at info@storagepoint.com if you have any questions or would like to request access to the Release Candidate.  We will not issue pre-release trials without full corporate contact information (Name, Title, Company, Address, Phone Number, and Email Address).
• Attend one of our weekly StoragePoint 3.0 Overview sessions.
• Follow us on Twitter for updates on new content (videos, whitepapers, blogs, etc.).
• Find us on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/StoragePoint
• Check storagepoint.com on June 14th for our new site.

With the RTM of SharePoint 2010 I feel comfortable proclaiming that the days of traditional ECM vendors (i.e. FileNet, OpenText, and Documentum) are numbered.  The picture of a bunch of dinosaurs looking up to the sky as a big fiery ball bears down on them comes to mind and at the same time seems appropriate. These dinosaurs have prolonged their existence by adopting a wide array of co-existence strategies in a thinly veiled attempt to pigeonhole MOSS as a complimentary offering.  It is (…and has been since 2007) a viable alternative or replacement, something that has been proven over and over again by partners like the company I co-founded, BlueThread.  We took a great platform, filled some gaps, worked with some partners, and made it easier for organizations to adopt it as a true ECM platform.

SharePoint has most of the content management capabilities an organization needs.  Out of the box it delivers exceptional forms management capabilities and reasonable records management capabilities that are vastly improved with SharePoint 2010.  Add portal, collaboration, and business intelligences capabilities that you won’t find in any other CM/DM platform and an enormous partner community that fills any real or perceived gaps and it’s game over. 

And SharePoint’s approachability from an IT organization perspective along with the high rate of adoption within an end user community makes it the only viable Enterprise Content Management platform available today in my mind.  The expense and complexity associated with standing up and maintaining these legacy CM platforms prohibits them from being deployed enterprise-wide.  Not to mention the at times awful end user experience they surface…goes back to the primary co-existence strategy theme…use SharePoint as the portal to our repository.  These platforms are at best point (i.e. claims management at a healthcare insurer) or departmental (i.e. accounts payable) solutions.

So if I’m even only partially right, why haven’t more companies adopted SharePoint to manage all or least most of their enterprise’s content?  Why do we still see huge volumes of unmanaged contents sitting on file shares?  Why are organizations still putting their content in underutilized, yet highly expensive legacy content and document management solutions?  Why do they still fill file cabinets, filing rooms, and warehouses with a small forest’s worth of paper?  I did the traditional ECM thing for a 10+ years and have been doing the Microsoft SharePoint thing for going on 7+ now, so I think I know at least some of the reasons why.  So here I go, we’ll see how I do…

1. Microsoft has to rely on partners to deliver True or Total ECM.  As a longtime partner, I hear this one a lot.  Can someone please define what it means to be a True or Total ECM platform?  That would be like me saying, I’m a True American or a Total Italian.  To the guy working on the assembly line in Detroit I am probably a True American because I’ve never owned anything other than a GM, Ford, or Chrysler automobile.  But the guy working the line down at the Toyota plant in Georgetown, KY will very reasonably argue that the cars he produces are every bit American and would not give me “True American” credit for my choices.  Total Italian?  I like pasta, pizza, and Italian pastries from Sorrento’s Bakery in East Hanover NJ where I grew up…and my 3 boys are Nick, Vinnie, and Joey, but I’ll take a Cabernet over a Chianti most of the time and if Jersey Shore is about being Italian than I’m officially changing my nationality.  So what’s the lesson here…this assertion is all about perspective.  To some folks, SharePoint OOB will do what they need it to.  But if they want to scan documents they’re going to need something like KnowledgeLake, just like you’d need a Kofax or Captiva if you were going to implement FileNet.  If you want to do BPM (…not workflow…there is difference…one makes people more efficient…the other tries to remove people from the process) you’re going to need something like K2, just like you’d need Pega or Lombardi if you wanted to do more than what was offered OOB with the others.  And if you want to have short, near, and long-term storage options for your SharePoint content you’re going to need something like StoragePoint, just like you’d need Tivoli or some other hugely expensive solution if you wanted to do what StoragePoint does with FileNet or any of the others.  So with this in mind, maybe a) we can agree that SharePoint is not one size fits all and a company’s perspective and requirements will ultimately dictate how True or Total SharePoint is as an ECM platform and b) agree that complementary partner solutions are good and needed and not scary.  They should not be seen as evidence that SharePoint is somehow incomplete.  They exist to make SharePoint applicable across a wider range of solution patterns and usage scenarios, whether we’re talking about ECM or not.  They allow organizations to get more out of their SharePoint investments, which I think is good for everyone…the customers, Microsoft, and the partner ecosystem as a whole.


2. SharePoint is incomplete.  Somewhat related to #1, but not entirely.  This is more about the whole 80/20 rule as it relates to traditional ECM platforms…80% of the cost is represented by 20% of the functionality.  Microsoft is happy, and from my perspective rightfully so, delivering 80% of the functionality for 20% of the cost of traditional platforms.  It’s that difference that makes it the only True ECM platform on the market because it’s truly accessible enterprise-wide.  That other 20% of functionality is used by such a small percentage of the users within an enterprise that it normally can’t be cost justified.  By way of example, I worked with a large Blue Cross Blue Shield that was contemplating a move from Stellent to SharePoint and the Stellent guy (…I’ll talk about his kind in #7) couldn’t accept SharePoint as a replacement because it didn’t have this obscure set of features available out of the box or from a 3rd party.  This was a 20,000+ person organization.  Anybody want to guess how many people used these features?  Less than a dozen!  So the rationale for not replacing an expensive and highly underutilized legacy content manage platform with SharePoint was the needs of .06% of the organization’s employees.  If the job function of these people was mission critical and there was not an alternative approach to addressing their requirements then I guess you may have a justification, but there was nothing mission critical about what they were doing and there were several viable  alternative approaches using SharePoint’s out of the box capabilities and readily available 3rd party solutions.  The lesson here…most of what most of an organizations end users will need is there out of the box or readily available from partners…don’t allow the lack of highly specialized and often expensive functionality to hold you back.  In all likelihood that specialized functionality is making it harder and more expensive than it needed to be in the first place.


3. Anything that cheap can’t be any good.  I heard this for the 1st time about 5 years ago when I was presenting to the Chicago chapter of AIIM on SharePoint Content Management back in my KnowledgeLake days.  They loved the message, lots of nodding heads, and then the sales guy threw up a slide on what it all cost and the room broke out into laughter.  These folks were used to paying upwards of a few thousand dollars per user for a FileNet, just for document imaging…throw in workflow or records management and you were talking several thousand dollars per user.  So a message promoting the idea that you can do pretty much everything you’re doing in a FileNet in SharePoint + some add-ons for the cost of FileNet maintenance was so beyond belief that it amused the 100+ attendee audience we were presenting to.  To say the least it was an eye-opening experience.  As SharePoint has evolved and become more prominent in enterprises the cost of the traditional ECM platforms has dropped, but you still find this attitude from time to time, especially in large organizations.


4. Best Practices, Governance, and Information Architecture.  Folks are quick to dismiss SharePoint as an ECM platform because there are not well-established best practices, governance, and IA around ECM.  That is a debatable point in my mind…there’s actually a lot of information out there on these topics…granted, not all good, but there is plenty of knowledgeable folks having thoughtful discussion on these and other topics.  I will say that it’s equally debatable whether or not there are good best practices, governance, and IA available for all the other ECM platforms out there.  I guess the point here is if someone asserts that they are hesitant to implement SharePoint for ECM for a lack of the above, ask them to see the above for any of the others.  It’s just kind of a weak objection and I encourage you to call it out as such.


5. Conventional wisdom is that SharePoint doesn’t scale.  This is almost always asserted by analysts in the ECM space in one form or another. A lot of times it’s not such a definitive declaration, it’s more of an “at least we don’t think it scale” or “there is not enough evidence to support scalability claims” or something like that.  I think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it scales quite nicely, both on its own and with the help of add-ons.  KnowledgeLake published a whitepaper a couple years ago that showed 10’s of millions of documents managed in a farm with all the content sitting in SQL.  It worked without issue.  Could they have scaled that out even further and more economically if they remoted the BLOBs with something like StoragePoint…most definitely yes, but that’s more of a storage cost and to some extent a SQL cost consideration rather than a question of the architecture’s scalability.  That being said, there are definitely performance and scalability improvements to be had when you remote the BLOBs from SQL, especially with bulk (…think mail room scanning or customer statements imported from a mainframe AFP stream) operations.  So analysts, naysayers, and the dude from OpenText that calls it ScarePoint every time he does a presentation (…you know who you are), stop hiding behind a perceived lack of evidence that SharePoint scales or the fear that it actually might. 


6. Risk avoidance.  This is the person that hates keeping all their content in that legacy repository, but is risk adverse.  No one has been able to convince them that they can easily and without issue move all that content from legacy platform X to SharePoint.  No one has been able to convince them that it’s an affordable and low to no risk exercise.  No one has been able to convince them that it can be done in a reasonable amount of time with little or no impact to business continuity.  I frankly think this starts with a general level of immaturity within the Microsoft partner ecosystem on what ECM is.  I hear a lot of partners talk about ECM and proclaim themselves ECM experts, but I don’t regularly see evidence to back up the talk.  That has translated into failed implementations and burnt fingers and contributes to the myth that SharePoint can’t be my ECM platform.  It really speaks to the accessibility and approachability of the platform along with the massive size of the partner ecosystem.  It creates a dynamic where an organization has to weed through all the partners out there to find the ones that really do understand ECM, can translate that to SharePoint, and in the end help the customer achieve their goals.  You think I’m unfairly asserting something here.  Go to your local Borders or Barnes & Noble or go search Amazon.com for both SharePoint and FileNet.  Not only are you not going to find much on FileNet (…or Documentum or OpenText or Stellent), but you won’t find anything that ends in “for Dummies”.  Not suggesting that the “ECM experts” in the SharePoint ecosystem are dummies, just that I think the ecosystem has generally over-simplified what ECM is and has little expertise with legacy ECM platforms and getting content out of them and into SharePoint.


7. Job Security.  No, this is not the same person talked about in #6.  This person likes all the content in that legacy repository.  It was hard to stand-up, it’s hard and expensive to maintain, and he/she has created the perception that if anyone other than them even looks at it the whole thing will come crashing down.  This is the clown that keeps the person in #6 from doing anything, acting in their own best interests and not the best interests of their organization.  They like things just the way they are and there is at least one of these folks in every organization.  If SharePoint has any chance at becoming an enterprise-wide standard for content management within an organization, these folks have to be disarmed or marginalized.  You’re also never going to be their friend, so don’t waste any time trying to be.

There are most certainly other reasons, but I think this is a good start.  Feel free to leave a comment with others or challenge my lucky 7.

If you’re currently burdened by expensive and hard to maintain legacy content management platforms or have content in more places than you count and want to get all or most of it into SharePoint but don’t know where to start then reach out to us.  Metalogix has both solutions for getting content from any number of content sources into SharePoint and efficiently and cost effectively managing it once it’s there.  We also have partner companies and friends that can help you where we can’t and would be happy to point you in the right direction.

StoragePoint 3.0 Information (RTM June 14th)

• Contact us at info@storagepoint.com if you have any questions or would like to request access to the Release Candidate.  We will not issue pre-release trials without full corporate contact information (Name, Title, Company, Address, Phone Number, and Email Address).
• Attend one of our weekly StoragePoint 3.0 Overview sessions.
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• Check storagepoint.com on June 14th for our new site

We've heard stuff like the following over the past few months (...with increasing frequency as we approach the RTM of SharePoint 2010):

"SharePoint will do BLOB remoting OOB with 2010 so there is no need for a StoragePoint-like solution."

"SharePoint 2010 on top of SQL 2008 will do what StoragePoint does."

"BLOB Remoting is or will become commoditized, so there's no need to pay for it."

Some of these are just plain inaccurate.  There is no OOB BLOB Remoting capability in SharePoint 2010...I've looked for it, can't find it.  There are two provider interfaces, EBS and RBS, that you can plug a solution into, but that's it.  The closest you can come to an OOB solution is the RBS FILESTREAM provider.  It's a stretch to call this OOB.  And not because it's a separate install.  And not because it's a pain to implement.  It's a stretch to call it OOB because it doesn't do an awful lot...it's at best an entry level solution.

It doesn't provide you with the capability to save much money on storage (...BLOB store needs to be local to SQL), make your BLOB store smaller (...no compression), make your BLOB store more secure (...no encryption), or make your SharePoint implementation faster.

So if you're not going to derive much benefit from implementing it then why would Microsoft create it?  The answer is quite simple.  It's there for all the folks running WSS 3.0 with the WIDE (Windows Internal Database Engine) option.  It's there so these folks can upgrade to SFS (SharePoint Foundation Server) and use SQL Express 2008 and stay within it's per-instance limits.  For reference, SQL 2008 R2 Express has a per-instance limit of 10GB...pretty good, but there are plenty of folks out there with WSS 3/WIDE that have a lot more than that.  And I'm not trying to suspend reality in order to sell you some unnecessary 3rd party solution.  I'd go away quietly (...not normally a trait attributable to me), embarrassed that we built something that didn't need to be built, if that was the case.  We happen to see a lot of value in our solution...value that customers have, are, and will continue to pay for.

And you know what, you don't take my word for it because there are plenty of articles and blog posts out there on this topic:

From Jie Li, Technical Product Manager on the SharePoint Team in Redmond: http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2010/03/24/faq-sharepoint-2010-remote-blob-storage-rbs.aspx or http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/12/07/sharepoint-2010-beta-with-filestream-rbs-provider.aspx

From TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663474(office.14).aspx or http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748607(office.14).aspx

I hate the fact that we have to create StoragePoint vs. RBS FILESTREAM Provider position papers or I have to waste time on blog posts like this.  Why are solutions so quickly dismissed if there is a real or perceived OOB capability in an upcoming SharePoint release?  Why is it assumed that this new capability will magically meet the needs of every SharePoint customer out there?  Is SharePoint and the highly energized community that orbits it "one size fits all"?  The answer is most definitively NO!  And that's a good thing.  I'm reasonably confident that most of us wouldn't be doing what we're doing today if it was.

I'd like to suggest a compromise on this point.  We'll stay away from the WSS 3.0/WIDE upgrade business if it's not assumed that the RBS FILESTREAM Provider provides the same value across a wide array of industries and customer sizes as StoragePoint does.  Seems like a fair (...and obvious) compromise. 

As always, please feel free to leave a comment or email me directly at rdoria@metalogix.net if you think I'm wrong or misleading folks.  Maybe we could debate the topic at a SharePoint Saturday or other event in the future.

The StoragePoint product team is pleased to announce that its highly-anticipated 3.0 release will RTM on June 15th.  The release builds on our award-winning 2.0 product with a long list of enterprise class features.  The release will include an intelligent archiving module, extensive Powershell support, more monitoring and reporting, and intelligent endpoint management to name a few.  Existing StoragePoint maintenance customers will be able to seemlessly upgrade for free to the 3.0 release.

This release will support both SharePoint 2007 (WSS and MOSS) and 2010 (SFS and MSS).

Stay tuned for more information on features and a schedule of pre-release webinars.

Ping us at info@storagepoint.com if you are interested in learning more or want to get early access to V3.  We are only making V3 available to a select group of customers and partners, so please be specific about your use case and provide full contact information in your request.  One of our technical pre-sales engineers will follow-up.

We wanted to create a video that highlighted the problem that StoragePoint solves, how we solve it, and what the experience of some of our customers has been.  I think this does a very good job of that...hopefully you will agree.  Enjoy and please share it with your associates, colleagues, customers, partners, friends, enemies, and members of your bowling team.