Soarsoft Africa announces the launch of HPs Information Governance Services to mitigate risk for regulated industries

Soarsoft Africa, a specialist of archive, migration, messaging and collaboration solutions and distributor of HP Autonomy solutions in southern Africa, has recently announced the latest HP Information Governance Services built on HP Autonomy technologies. The services are designed to enable compliance officers and legal counsel to manage structured and unstructured data according to business value and risk.

HP Information Governance Services deliver greater control over information assets, supporting organisations in their efforts to leverage the value of information in business-driven processes, operational efficiency, risk mitigation and cost reduction.

“As data repositories continue to grow rapidly within the organisation, our customers are finding it increasingly difficult to shed light on their ‘dark data’.  Data management tools have thus become increasingly important. In addition, the ability to quickly find, monitor and take action on specific information is gaining prominence, largely due to the introduction of regulatory requirements such as the Protection of Personal Information (PoPI) Act and the awareness this has created for good corporate governance around electronic information,” says Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa.

“The ability to automatically monitor and do ‘defensible deletion’ of obsolete and risky information is key for information governance and also reducing the costs and overheads associated with storing unnecessary information. HP’s Information Governance Services help to address all of these needs, adding transparency to the process and assisting our customers to manage their information from beginning to end,” he adds.

A comprehensive approach to information governance
Information governance requires a comprehensive approach that sits at the intersection of people, process and technology. HP Information Governance Services combine industry-leading technology from HP Autonomy with deep domain expertise from HP Enterprise Services to position clients to gain a fast return on their technology investments while successfully supporting business strategy.

 The services component of the solution covers the full business life cycle from assessment and design to implementation and ongoing support. Typical use cases of the portfolio include:

• Records management: A unique combination of consulting services and the HP Records Manager product supports client efforts to capture, search and manage business records from any source.
• Information archiving: HP’s archiving technology can be combined with integration and consulting services to help organisations manage retention and dispose of information to assist in compliance with changing regulations while simultaneously obtaining insights for better business decisions.
• Classification: Expert service combined with HP ControlPoint technology provides a better understanding of where data is stored, how it is used and its business context and value. These HP Classification Services can be delivered at different stages of Information Governance and serve as a phased approach to data clean up, life cycle management and optimisation.

The development of information policies and processes along with an accountability and responsibility framework is vital for any records management and archiving implementation and is an integral part of the HP Information Governance offering.

HP Enterprise Services is leveraging HP Autonomy’s technology to implement, automate and enforce the execution of information policies across the enterprise.

With HP Information Governance Services, clients may experience:
• Reduced risk exposure from compliance with retention regulation and ability to find information.
• Improved efficiency by boosting productivity and efficiency by decreasing the growing volume of uncontrolled data.
• Lowered eDiscovery and investigation costs through automated and repeatable processes.

About HP
HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. With the broadest technology portfolio spanning printing, personal systems, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP delivers solutions for customers' most complex challenges in every region of the world. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

About Soarsoft Africa
Soarsoft Africa focuses on Archive, Migration, Messaging and Collaboration solutions, with a successful track record that spans over a decade.  Leveraging the experience gained from some of the largest and most complex information management implementations around the world, we are able to deliver cost effective and successful projects and solutions.  Soarsoft only supports and implements what it considers to be trusted and proven solutions to meet our customers’ specific information management requirements. Soarsoft Africa continues to evaluate its offerings to ensure they maintain market and technological leadership positions, so that clients are offered the very best and up-to-date advice when assessing their requirements.  Soarsoft Africa operates throughout Africa and parts of the Middle East and has offices in both Johannesburg and Cape Town South Africa.

For more information, visit www.soarsoft.co.za

Opinion Piece: Effective archive-to-archive migrations require specialist tools and expert assistance to ensure you recover your legacy archive data. By Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa

A combination of many factors has necessitated the requirement for Archiving platforms in many larger corporates over the past 10 years. These factors include Legislative and Corporate Governance Requirements, massive volumes of email and other unstructured data, as well as user generated data within files and folders. A key driver for Archiving solutions has typically been the ability to gain efficiencies in dealing with the continuous growth in the storage requirement and subsequent Backup, Continuity and Recovery overheads. In addition, Information Governance, Information Retention and eDiscovery elements has played an equally significant role and in specific cases, have even formed the overriding requirement for the Archive Platforms to date.

Ten to fifteen years on from the first ‘commoditised’ Archive Technologies and vendors, we have had a significant change in the unstructured data ‘Archive’ landscape. This has largely been driven by the requirement to archive the multitude of new and widely used platforms beyond just traditional email, like Instant and Social Messaging, Reuters, and Collaboration Platforms like Lync and SharePoint.  The introduction of ‘cloud’ based messaging and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Office 365 (as well as Hosted Exchange and SharePoint), Skydrive, Dropbox, Box.net and many more appearing on a regular basis, has significantly changed the location and access to the ‘Source’ data needing to be archived. The resulting ‘hybrid’ combinations of ‘on-site’ and cloud-based corporate information platforms is becoming increasingly common. In addition, a lack of scalability within an archiving solution and the inability to cope with the volume of data over the long-term results in an archive that is difficult to manage, necessitating a migration to a new platform.

This shift in the requirements and flexibility required by modern archive platforms has resulted in many large, established vendors of these Archive technologies needing to completely re-write their product code and tool sets, at the risk of losing out to more flexible and even cloud-based archive platforms and services.  This, in combination with the continuous pressure on IT departments to reduce costs and leverage the ‘cloud’ for storage and email within corporate environments, has seen the requirement to implement, migrate or move to a modern archive platform that deals with cloud and on-site based information. Archiving solutions may also have become obsolete or end of life, lacking the functionality to support hosted Exchange or cloud solutions such as Microsoft 365. In some cases customers may want to consume a cloud-based solution like Microsoft’s Office 365, but still need to archive data in South Africa due to Data Sovereignty requirements. Large migrations to newer versions, acquisitions and mergers are also often a trigger for archive migrations.

Each archive solution is engineered differently to others and therefore requires skills and knowledge specific to the particular software solution. Unsuccessful archive migrations can have significant consequences to a business, and it therefore pays to get migrations right the first time. Users are constantly accessing the archived data, there are huge volumes of data collected in these platforms, and Source platforms such as email servers are highly reliant on them to off-load data for efficiency.  As a result of these factors, archive migrations at first seem nearly impossible and overly complex to action.

For these and other reasons, the need to conduct archive-to-archive migrations is on the increase, and as the requirement has grown so too have the specialist services and tool sets required to complete them. However, for the majority of organisations it is a significant challenge to have resources that have the required skills to perform a successful and timely migration between archives. In order to achieve the migration, resources need to have an in-depth understanding of the existing archiving solution as well as the solution that the content will be migrated to. Having a partner that specialises in these migrations can assist to reduce risk, ensure compliance and simplify the process of moving content from archive product A to archive product B.

The complexity of migrations is exacerbated by the huge volumes of data that exist within archiving solutions, typically generated over a number of years. The platforms themselves may also not have been adequately maintained and may not be performing well, which makes the migration more difficult to achieve.

When companies do attempt to conduct their own archive-to-archive migrations, the process typically needs to be completed manually, which can end up taking years to complete. During this time it is all too easy to lose track of what data has been migrated and what has not, and there is no way of checking this with a manual migration. Using native migration tools can also prove difficult, as failure to migrate data is not reported on. During an archive-to-archive migration it is essential to ensure that the chain of custody is not compromised – in other words that during the process of the migration the integrity of the data was not compromised at all, which is practically impossible without some form of reporting.

A successful migration should be as seamless as possible for users, and should take place in the back end until such time as cutover occurs. Users should also have as few disruptions as possible and should be able to access all legacy information throughout the process. Compliance with eDiscovery requirements such as chain of custody should be met before, during and after the migration and the migration should be fast and direct across multiple platforms. These many challenges serve to highlight the requirement to have access to a partner with expertise, skill and experience in a number of archiving platforms, and to make use of specialised tools that have been designed to simplify these archive migrations.

The reality is that the skills pool around archiving migrations is very limited, not simply in South Africa but across the globe. The required skills across the many different platforms, technologies and vendor solutions are not common, as most service providers focus on single vendor solutions. Ensuring a successful archive-to-archive migration across platforms requires the services of an experienced multi-vendor service provider with knowledge and understanding of multiple Archive vendor solutions.  Service providers should also specialise in core systems such as those provided by Microsoft, IBM, Zimbra and others, and have access to a variety of tools to assist with the migration.

From both a risk and time perspective, it pays hugely to partner with a service provider that has experience with cross-platform messaging and archiving migrations, ensuring that migrations are completed quickly, effectively and with full compliance and audit trails in place.

VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.soarsoft.co.za

Editorial contacts:

Soarsoft Africa
Chris Hathaway
Director
Tel: 021 200 2393
Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR
Lesley Rencontre
Tel: 011-462 0679
Email: Lesley@evolutionpr.co.za

Metalogix Updates SharePoint Strategy, UI for Axceler Tools By Anthony Myers

Metalogix Updates SharePoint Strategy, UI for Axceler Tools

By Anthony Myers  |  Nov 5, 2013  

Forrester Report: ECM Forrester Wave Report (Download Now)

Metalogix Updates SharePoint Strategy, UI for Axceler ToolsMetalogix, a provider of content infrastructure software, updated the interface for its ControlPoint SharePoint administration tool from its Axcelor acquisition. It's also giving us a clearer view of its overall strategy on the shifting SharePoint landscape.

Murky SharePoint Strategy

Customers use Metalogix products to upgrade, migrate, organize, store, archive and replicate content on Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and Cloud platforms. And any company operating in the vast ecosystem of SharePoint tools has to contend with one messy reality.

Microsoft simply isn't saying as much as it could about its plans for maintaining what are virtually two different products: SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online.

Microsoft is investing heavily in SharePoint Online. While SharePoint Server will continue to get regular upgrades, it seems likely the focus on the cloud will affect on premises products, said Jeffrey Mann, Gartner's research vice president, said during a recent Gartner Symposium.

"We wish there was more detail with the SharePoint road map," Jignesh Shah, chief strategy and marketing officer at Metalogix, said in an interview. "You could argue SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server are not the same product today. But Microsoft is committed to on premises customers. It's just that some areas of the cloud will be updated faster and will integrate more with other Microsoft products."

The Metalogix team recently met with Microsoft. Shah said his company tries to align with Microsoft's vision. He also clued us into what customers are working on with their SharePoint Online migrations. Moving email to the cloud is one of the most popular. Social sync and share are other popular cloud migrations, he added, and customers are increasingly looking to host their SharePoint deployments on AWS, Azure or Rackspace.

This allows them to do more customization, Jignesh said, noting that Office 365 simply isn't enough for those customers. Hosting and managing SharePoint servers in those environments allows companies to have more control and be more elastic like when they need to scale workloads up or down.

The app model is a move in the right direction as well, Shah added, and Microsoft clearly sees companies want to extend SharePoint.  "The app model also helps with discoverability and it seems Microsoft got it right."

ControlPoint 5.2 Rolls Out

Metalogix has rolled out ControlPoint 5.2. Besides adding its own logo to the product, user controls are meant to be more accessible to business users, Gail Shlansky, an Axceler senior director of product management (now with Metalogix, of course) said in an interview.

"In a SharePoint deployment, IT wants control, but they like to give responsibility to others for day to day managing," she said. "With this update, IT can be comfortable knowing nobody has access to things they aren't allowed to." 

Business users and non technical staff can be inside SharePoint working on their projects, while IT maintains a high level of control over who does what. Shah and Shlansky said Metalogix customers should feel like they have access to the best of breed in SharePoint tools, and future updates like mobile friendly tools that are now in the works.

The mobile update will arrive in 2014, but Shah could not be more specific about a release date than that, he said. Metalogix competes most often with companies like AvePoint. Shah claims his company's focus on a best of breed approach is what differentiates it.

Soarsoft Africa announces Metalogix acquisition of Idera’s SharePoint Business including market-leading SharePoint Backup and Diagnostic Manager

Soarsoft Africa, a specialist of archive, migration, messaging and collaboration solutions and distributor of Metalogix solutions in southern Africa, has announced Metalogix’s acquisition of Idera’s highly successful and profitable SharePoint business, including the market-leading backup and monitoring products, SharePoint Backup and SharePoint Diagnostic Manager. The acquisition of Idera’s SharePoint products, customer base, brands and all related assets expands Metalogix’s suite of best-of-breed content infrastructure management software and strengthens the company’s position as the fastest-growing SharePoint Independent Software Vendor (ISV).

“Metalogix’s expansion and growth as the most complete specialist software vendor for SharePoint solutions has been phenomenal and has allowed us to quickly expand our offerings to new and existing clients. In each case, Metalogix’s acquisitions have been ’best of breed’ with leading solutions that have been quickly integrated into the existing capabilities. As a result, it has been relatively easy for Soarsoft to expand local implementation, training and support facilities to local partners and customers. Soarsoft is excited by the acquisition and looks forward to assisting local organisations with any requirements or queries they may have in understanding all the new features and benefits available,” says Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa.

Metalogix suite of best-in-class SharePoint products now includes Idera’s SharePoint Backup product, the industry’s fastest SharePoint backup technology, which delivers instant deployments and full farm protection of business critical content. Metalogix will integrate SharePoint Backup with Metalogix StoragePoint, the industry-leading storage optimisation technology, to provide lightning-fast speeds for the backup and recovery of Terabytes (TB) of content in just minutes, instead of hours or days. SharePoint Backup also features easy, granular document recovery capabilities and powerful backup file compression that saves storage space, which is essential as organisations work to manage a rapidly expanding volume of SharePoint content for today’s increasingly collaborative, global and mobile workforce. Metalogix will also expand the proactive real-time visibility and control capabilities of its best-in-class software suite with the addition of Idera’s monitoring product, SharePoint Diagnostic Manager. Additionally, SharePoint Enterprise Manager and Audit products will be upgraded and swiftly integrated into the recently-launched Metalogix ControlPoint for SharePoint Governance and Administration technology.

“Today Metalogix is once again improving the use and performance of the Microsoft SharePoint content management platform with the industry’s most innovative and fastest backup and recovery software, which enables enterprise SharePoint administrators, IT executives and now business line professionals to quickly and easily backup and restore TB of content in minutes, with a few clicks, instead of taking hours or days,” says Steven Murphy, CEO of Metalogix. “The powerful combination of Metalogix and Idera’s industry-leading SharePoint products squarely delivers on our mission to provide customers with the industry’s best-in-class portfolio of content infrastructure management software to deploy, operate and protect Microsoft SharePoint platforms on-premises and in the cloud.”

“The integration of Idera’s SharePoint business with Metalogix portfolio of premier products for the management of the entire SharePoint lifecycle will exponentially increase efficiencies and value for our customers managing enterprise SharePoint environments. These customers will also benefit from Metalogix’s larger, global, 24 by 7 customer support. This transaction accelerates our focus on a suite of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions that drive exceptional customer value,” says Randy Jacops, Idera’s CEO.

With over 14,000 customers, in 86 countries on 7 continents, Metalogix is the fastest growing SharePoint-focused Independent Software Vendor (ISV) in the world. Metalogix is committed to integrating and enhancing the combined product portfolios to help customers enhance the use and performance of SharePoint. New and existing customers will benefit from Metalogix expanded reach, scale and resources, including its industry-leading LIVE 24 by 7 telephone and online support program, which helps our customers maintain the highest level of availability to support the demands of always-on content sharing and collaboration.

With over 12,000 customers, Idera will continue operating multiple, profitable product solutions, including Idera’s award-winning SQL database monitoring and server backup products, as well as the recently acquired CopperEgg and Precise Software business units.
To learn more about Metalogix products visit: http://www.metalogix.com/Products.aspx
###

About Metalogix
Metalogix provides content infrastructure software to improve the use and performance of enterprise content. For over a decade, Metalogix has transformed the way commercial and government organisations manage TBs of content to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration. Today, more than 14,000 customers rely on the company’s products to upgrade, migrate, organise, store, archive and replicate content on Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and Cloud platforms. Metalogix has moved more than 50,000 TBs of content.

Metalogix was named to Inc.’s 500 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies in 2012 and was recognised as the fastest growing software company in the Washington, D.C. area by the Washington Business Journal. Metalogix is a Microsoft Gold Partner, a managed partner in Microsoft’s Public Sector, a member of the Microsoft Partner Advisory Board and a certified GSA provider. Metalogix is a privately held company backed by Insight Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and contact us at +1 202-690-9100 or www.Metalogix.com for free downloads and success stories.

About Idera
Idera is a leading provider of application and server management solutions. Idera provides a wide variety of application performance management products including solutions for Microsoft SQL Server. Idera also provides award-winning server backup solutions for both managed service providers and enterprise customers. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Idera is a Microsoft Managed Partner and has over 12,000 customers worldwide. Contact Idera at +1-713-523-4433 or visit www.idera.com for free trials, free tools and more information.

About Soarsoft Africa 
Soarsoft Africa focuses on Archive, Migration, Messaging and Collaboration solutions, with a successful track record that spans over a decade. Leveraging the experience gained from some of the largest and most complex information management implementations around the world, we are able to deliver cost effective and successful projects and solutions. Soarsoft only supports and implements what it considers to be trusted and proven solutions to meet our customers’ specific information management requirements. Soarsoft continues to evaluate its offerings to ensure they maintain market and technological leadership positions, so that clients are offered the very best and up-to-date advice when assessing their requirements. Soarsoft Africa operates throughout Africa and parts of the Middle East and has offices in both Johannesburg and Cape Town South Africa.

Editorial Contacts:

Soarsoft Africa: 

Chris Hathaway
Tel: 021 200 2393
Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR
Lesley Rencontre 
Tel: 011 462 0679
Email: Lesley@evolutionpr.co.za

Press release: Soarsoft announces Metalogix’ acquisition of Axceler’s SharePoint Business

Fastest growing SharePoint Independent Software Vendor (ISV) expands to offer best-in-class technology across entire SharePoint lifecycle

  

Soarsoft Africa, a specialist of archive, migration, messaging and collaboration solutions and distributor of Metalogix solutions in Southern Africa, has announced Metalogix’ acquisition of Axceler’s highly successful and profitable SharePoint business, including the industry’s most powerful and widely-used governance and administration product, ControlPoint for SharePoint Administration. The acquisition of Axceler’s related products, employees, assets and brands, positions Metalogix as the fastest growing SharePoint-focused Independent Software Vendor (ISV) in the world.  

“As two of the leading global SharePoint vendors, Metalogix and Axceler had highly synergistic product sets, and joining forces will enable them to offer a more complete offering. As local distributors of both product sets prior to the merger, we are well positioned to offer the South African market comprehensive local presence, support and training from a single vendor. We will also be able to offer a single solution with an expanded range of options to our customers, which makes sound financial sense and further assists to simplify the complexity of SharePoint tasks and management,” says Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa.

The addition of ControlPoint for SharePoint Administration, to Metalogix market-leading portfolio of content infrastructure software establishes the company as a single source supplier of premier products for the management of the entire SharePoint lifecycle.  The expanded Metalogix product portfolio delivers expanded visibility and proactive control over enterprise SharePoint environments. 

It also enables customers to effectively manage the increasing scale of SharePoint deployments, explosive growth in business content and the need to mitigate security risks. ControlPoint for SharePoint Administration enables organizations to easily manage their SharePoint platform and enforce governance strategies that protect business assets while driving employee adoption and productivity. The ControlPoint family of offerings, which have won more than a dozen awards, are used by over 3,000 organisations worldwide to manage more than 14 million SharePoint users. 

“Today’s announcement is truly a game-changer in the SharePoint industry. The addition of the leading SharePoint Governance and Administration management product to Metalogix offering extends our range, reach and leadership in the strategic SharePoint governance market segment.  This investment is another milestone in our strategy to provide customers the best-of-breed content infrastructure software to deploy, operate and protect their Microsoft SharePoint platform, on-premise or in the cloud,” says Steven Murphy, CEO of Metalogix. “SharePoint customers can now buy the premier migration, administration, storage optimisation, and replication technology from a single source – Metalogix.”

“Over the past four years SharePoint adoption has grown tremendously across enterprises of all sizes. As the market has matured, SharePoint has increasingly become a vital and complex asset for tens of thousands of operations,” says Michael Alden, CEO of Axceler. “SharePoint administrators are increasingly seeking single-source technology providers who can provide exceptional technology and offer comprehensive, global 24x7 support. The integration of Axceler’s SharePoint business with Metalogix is a natural evolution of the market and will drive significant value for those managing contemporary SharePoint environments.”

With over 10,000 customers, in 86 countries on 7 continents, Metalogix is the fastest growing SharePoint-focused Independent Software Vendor (ISV) in the world. Metalogix is committed to integrating and enhancing the combined product portfolios to help customers enhance the use and performance of SharePoint.  New and existing customers will benefit from the expanded reach, scale and resources of the new Metalogix, including its industry-leading live 24x7 support program, which manages the most complex global issues.

Axceler’s non-SharePoint business will continue to operate independently supporting solutions for Lotus Notes, Yammer and other collaboration platforms.

About Metalogix

 Metalogix provides content infrastructure software to improve the use and performance of enterprise content. For over a decade, Metalogix has transformed the way commercial and government organisations manage terabytes of content to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration. Today, over 10 000 customers rely on the company’s products to upgrade, migrate, organise, store, archive and replicate content on Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and Cloud platforms. Metalogix has moved more than 50,000 terabytes of content.

Metalogix is recognized as the fastest growing software company in the Washington D.C.-area by the Washington Business Journal and was named to the 2012 Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies. Metalogix is a Microsoft Gold Partner, a managed partner in Microsoft’s High Potential ISV Group and GSA provider. Metalogix is a privately held company backed by Insight Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

To learn more about Metalogix products, please visit: http://www.metalogix.com/powerful.aspx.

About Soarsoft Africa

Soarsoft Africa focuses on Archive, Migration, Messaging and Collaboration solutions, with a successful track record that spans over a decade.  Leveraging the experience gained from some of the largest and most complex information management implementations around the world, we are able to deliver cost effective and successful projects and solutions.  Soarsoft only supports and implements what it considers to be trusted and proven solutions to meet our customers’ specific information management requirements. Soarsoft continues to evaluate its offerings to ensure they maintain market and technological leadership positions, so that clients are offered the very best and up-to-date advice when assessing their requirements.  Soarsoft Africa operates throughout Africa and parts of the Middle East and has offices in both Johannesburg and Cape Town South Africa.

Editorial Contacts:

Soarsoft Africa

Chris Hathaway

Tel: 021 200 2393

Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR

Lesley Rencontre

Tel: 011 462 0679

Email: Lesley@evolutionpr.co.za

Press Release: Soarsoft Africa announces the first fully integrated SharePoint storage, backup and recovery solution - Metalogix StoragePoint

Soarsoft Africa, a specialist of archive, migration, messaging and collaboration solutions, has announced the release of Metalogix StoragePoint 4.2, the industry’s first and only fully integrated SharePoint storage, backup and recovery solution. Established as SharePoint’s top-selling storage optimisation product, the new release expands StoragePoint’s range of capabilities to include automated backup, either on-premises or in the cloud, and the ability to granularly restore lost content all the way down to the document level.

Says Chris Hathaway, Director of Soarsoft Africa: “It is essential for organisations of all sizes to ensure that a SharePoint backup and recovery strategy is in place. This becomes even more critical as the amount of data and importance of the content increases with the wider adoption of SharePoint as a Document Management and Collaboration solution for the enterprise.  StoragePoint is often already required or in place to archive and off-load content from the database and by automating your backup and recovery in the same platform, there are significant gains in efficiency and over all simplification of the platform. Furthermore, it caters to those organisations that leverage Cloud Storage and Backup Infrastructure, ensuring the solution is aligned with these cloud strategies.”

Organisations must now manage an average of 1 Terabyte (TB) of content within SharePoint environments and that content is nearly doubling every year. Due to this dramatic growth and SharePoint’s ascension as a mission-critical content management and collaboration platform, there is increasing pressure on organisations to develop a cohesive strategy for storing terabytes of content and achieving fast backup and recovery. Organisations have realised that existing storage and backup methods can no longer meet the stricter Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirements for data loss and recovery. For example, without StoragePoint, it can take up to eight hours to backup 1TB of content. With StoragePoint, it can be accomplished in minutes.

StoragePoint 4.2 provides a new, comprehensive approach for Binary Large Object (BLOB) storage, SharePoint backup and recovery, all of which can be accessed directly within a single user interface in the SharePoint central administration. StoragePoint uses Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) technology to offload the unstructured content such as Office documents and rich media files – known as BLOBs – from SQL Server to more appropriate and cheaper storage tiers. Externalising BLOBs shrinks content databases by up to 95% and allows databases to be automatically and continuously backed up in mere minutes. The product also provides granular, item-level restore capabilities for lost, deleted or corrupted content. StoragePoint enables these breakthrough capabilities for any version of SharePoint and is the first to do so for SharePoint 2013.

“Our customers have routinely inquired about improving their lengthy backup times and reducing the time it takes to respond to a user losing a document or folder,” says Steven Murphy, CEO, Metalogix. “We developed StoragePoint 4.2 to provide customers a simple way to address their SharePoint storage, backup and recovery needs. Within one familiar user interface, SharePoint administrators and IT professionals can quickly and easily backup and restore content in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours or days. StoragePoint 4.2 is a game-changer for SharePoint backup and recovery that will streamline these processes and improve productivity throughout an organisation.”

By using StoragePoint 4.2, organisations will no longer have to rely on time-consuming backup processes with SQL Backup or a central backup and recovery team to handle lost item requests. Additionally, the product introduces support for backup to the cloud, which will help further drive down storage costs. There are also new features that address event-based retention support for EMC Centera and synchronisation between SharePoint information management and external storage retention policies.

As part of the product release, Metalogix has introduced StoragePoint Express, which gives organisations the chance to use the product at no cost for up to 200 Gigabytes (GB) of content. StoragePoint Express features the RBS capabilities that have established StoragePoint as the market-leader for SharePoint storage optimisation and the new automated backup features.

“StoragePoint has a rich history of setting trends within the SharePoint industry and the introduction of StoragePoint Express continues this tradition,” says Jignesh Shah, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, Metalogix. “By offering up to 200GB for free, we are providing a unique opportunity to use our product risk-free and experience its breakthrough ability to improve SharePoint performance, slash SharePoint storage costs and reduce the time it takes to backup and recover SharePoint content.”

About Metalogix

Metalogix provides content infrastructure software to improve the use and performance of enterprise content. For over a decade, Metalogix has transformed the way commercial and government organisations manage terabytes of content to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration. Today, more than 7,500 customers rely on the company’s products to upgrade, migrate, organise, store, archive and replicate content on Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and Cloud platforms. Metalogix has moved more than 50,000 terabytes of content – more than every other ISV in the marketplace combined.

Metalogix is recognised as the fastest growing software company in the Washington D.C.-area by the Washington Business Journal and was named to the 2012 Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies. Metalogix is a Microsoft Gold Partner, a managed partner in Microsoft’s High Potential ISV Group and GSA provider. Metalogix is a privately held company backed by Insight Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

About Soarsoft Africa

Soarsoft Africa focuses on Archive, Migration, Messaging and Collaboration solutions, with a successful track record that spans over a decade.  Leveraging the experience gained from some of the largest and most complex information management implementations around the world, we are able to deliver cost effective and successful projects and solutions.  Soarsoft only supports and implements what it considers to be trusted and proven solutions to meet our customers’ specific information management requirements. Soarsoft continues to evaluate its offerings to ensure they maintain market and technological leadership positions, so that clients are offered the very best and up-to-date advice when assessing their requirements.  Soarsoft Africa operates throughout Africa and parts of the Middle East and has offices in both Johannesburg and Cape Town South Africa.

Editorial Contacts:

Soarsoft Africa

Chris Hathaway

Tel: 021 200 2393

Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR

Lesley Rencontre

Tel: 011 462 0679

Email: Lesley@evolutionpr.co.za

Opinion Piece: Moving to SharePoint 2013? Migrate, don’t upgrade, and take advantage of new enhanced features By Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa

SharePoint 2013 is one of the most anticipated software upgrades of the year, and many IT professionals are looking at implementing the solution for its enhanced features and particularly, its ability to support mobile devices. However, a large number of organisations are still using older versions of SharePoint, which can pose something of a challenge. According to official upgrade documentation, there is no way to upgrade directly from, for example, SharePoint 2007, to SharePoint 2013, short of first upgrading to SharePoint 2010, with all of the expenses and time that comes with this.

Moving to SharePoint 2013 offers organisations access to many new features, and one of the biggest developments is the ability to support mobile devices. In an increasingly mobile world, this is becoming critical to enable knowledge sharing and collaboration across an organisation, including to users on smartphones and tablets. In addition, SharePoint 2013 enables access to new MySites and new Community Sites, which are increasingly important given the rate of content generation and growth. Other features include managed navigation based on metadata, microblogging and activity feeds, e-Discovery integration with Exchange, and SEO-friendly URLs, all of which are highly beneficial for the modern organisation.

However, while many enterprises are highly interested in adopting SharePoint 2013, there is concern and budget constraint around the upgrade path as the versions cannot be ‘leapfrogged’. The upgrade is defined as a complete point-to-point transfer of the SharePoint databases from one version to another, and Microsoft does not support this path from older versions. However this is not the only solution.

While upgrading may not be possible, migrating is. Migration involves copying and moving items from a database, but not moving the database itself. All of the data within a SharePoint database can be read and copied, and then reproduced in a different database on a new SharePoint farm. Using advanced SharePoint migration tools, organisations can move from SharePoint 2007, or even earlier versions, directly to SharePoint 2013, and take advantage of the benefits. Content, site structures and permissions that support the content and workflows that use the content, can all be migrated.  New SharePoint templates can also be applied to the structure as part of the migration process. The right product will also ensure that no dependencies or limitations are created related to the SharePoint data in either the old or new database, ensuring full functionality.

A SharePoint migration also allows for items to be moved in a more granular fashion. In other words, it is not necessary for items to be moved to the exact equivalent location in the new SharePoint database and a "Big Bang" approach is avoided. This means that a new structure can be created to more closely match the way users utilise SharePoint and more effectively solve business problems using the tool. It is also possible to keep SharePoint more organised and aligned with business needs, as SharePoint migration tools also include content organisation capabilities. This makes it easier to split or merge sites as and when necessary, inject metadata or to reorganise the structure of a SharePoint farm in line with changing business requirements. 

Put simply, a SharePoint migration leaves the database in place, but allows for everything else to be copied and moved. This means that upgrading first to SharePoint 2010 is completely unnecessary for organisations wishing to move from 2007 to 2013. Irrespective of your current version of SharePoint, it is now possible, using advanced SharePoint migration tools, to move to SharePoint 2013 in a single, cost-effective step.

Editorial contacts:

Soarsoft Africa

Chris Hathaway

Director

Tel: 011-7812323

Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR

Liesl Simpson

Tel: 011-4620628