Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint

A Better Approach to SharePoint Recovery, Retention, and eDiscovery

The SharePoint® offering from Microsoft® encompasses two products – Windows® SharePoint Services™ (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS).  Organizations deploy SharePoint in order to make information more accessible to end users and to enhance collaboration among work groups.  Due to a relatively low cost, ease of use, tight integration to Microsoft Office applications like Outlook® and Word, and a wide range of features such as workflow, search, and access control, SharePoint has gained huge traction in the market.  Recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research of over 1,000 worldwide organizations indicates nearly one out of two respondent companies has deployed or is planning to deploy MOSS. (Source: ESG Research Report, “The Impact of Microsoft SharePoint on IT Infrastructure and Information Management,” March 2009)

The benefits SharePoint delivers are undeniable–better and more efficient team collaboration, version control for documents edited by multiple team members, and faster access to information via search; SharePoint brings a new level of control to high-volume, user-generated content.  However, the viral spread of SharePoint throughout organizations combined with its distributed deployment model does present some challenges to the efficient management of this important collaboration environment:

• Recovery built-in SharePoint recovery tools require a separate recovery farm and can modify metadata such as date and time stamps and who checked in the document when items are recovered.
• Storage Cost Management – the distributed nature of SharePoint deployments allows content to grow unfettered while Version Document Libraries store full copies of document versions.
• Migration – organizations wanting to upgrade from WSS to MOSS need to do a forklift upgrade, and those migrating from one version of WSS to another (e.g., 2003 to 2007) need additional tools because the Web Parts model changes with each version.
• Retention management -- it is impossible to implement effective retention and disposition policies that reduce eDiscovery and compliance risks because of the lack of central control over distributed deployments.
• eDiscovery – SharePoint does not offer an interface or workflow for legal teams to conduct unified searches across all user-generated content; place a legal hold without making another copy; or to review, tag, and export potentially responsive content.

Mimosa NearPoint™ for SharePoint Archiving

Mimosa NearPoint provides a holistic solution to managing SharePoint data with integrated archiving, recovery, and eDiscovery. NearPoint is the only SharePoint management product to combine both archiving and recovery while maintaining easy end-user access to information. In addition, Mimosa NearPoint offers the most comprehensive SharePoint data capture available. Customers can capture all content types and associated metadata and attachments, perform continuous capture via Change Notification, and preserve the relationships between sites and content. NearPoint also provides full-text indexing and global single-instancing on all archived content. This content can then be offloaded from SharePoint to enable storage cost savings while maintaining seamless end-user access via stubbing. Moreover, Mimosa NearPoint also manages the retention and disposition of SharePoint content across the archive in accordance with organizational policies.

With comprehensive capture and archiving capabilities also comes the ability to provide robust SharePoint recovery functionality. Mimosa NearPoint allows both fine-grained and coarse-grained recovery (see Figures 1 and 2). For fine-grained recovery, NearPoint allows administrators to browse and search the SharePoint hierarchy via the NearPoint admin console to select a recovery scope (e.g., specific item) and destination. Content can then be restored to the original or to a new destination while NearPoint automatically resolves discrepancies and respects permissions. With coarse-grained recovery, NearPoint recovers full SharePoint environments. This provides both recovery and migration solutions for SharePoint components such as the front-end web server, content databases, shared service provider (SSP) databases, the configuration database, and the search database and search index files.

Figure 1 - NearPoint for SharePoint Architecture

Figure 2 - Mimosa NearPoint Fine-Grained and Coarse-Grained SharePoint Recovery

Customers who use NearPoint to manage SharePoint repositories benefit in multiple ways.

• Mimosa NearPoint lowers SharePoint storage costs by storing only unique, single copies of content across all sites, site collections, and farms that have been archived.
• The Mimosa single instance model can optionally be applied to content archived from other sources such as Microsoft Exchange or Windows file servers.
• For documents archived from a Version Document Library, NearPoint stores only the delta changes of these documents instead of the full version of these documents. 
• NearPoint provides greater IT efficiency and saves recovery time by providing in-place, point-in-time, item-level recovery, coarse-grain recovery, and full recovery of database and file system data.  
• Organizations reduce risk by applying advanced eDiscovery workflow controls and in-place legal hold of SharePoint content. 
• End-users retain seamless, transparent access to their content via stubbing (see Figure 2) and through blended active and archive results from the SharePoint Search Server.

Figure 3 - Seamless End-User Access to Archived SharePoint Content

Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint Differentiators

Mimosa Systems offers a SharePoint Archiving and Recovery solution that has the tightest integration with WSS and MOSS of any product on the market.  With Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint, customers get all the benefits SharePoint has to offer, while gaining more control over the growth and management of SharePoint content and storage, better risk management with centralized retention policies and legal hold, and the ability to sleep well at night knowing recovery at any level of granularity is immediate.  Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint offers:

• The most comprehensive capture of SharePoint content
• Capture all content types via Object Model
• Preserve relationships between sites and content (maintain context)
• Continuous capture via Change Notification
• Integrated Archive and Data Protection
• In place item-level recovery
• Coarse-grain recovery 
• Full recovery of database and file systems data
• Easy end-user access to information  via stubbing and/or SharePoint search
• Delta storage of document versions to save storage costs
• Single-instance storage across all content-types – documents, images, sites
• Advanced eDiscovery workflow and in-place legal hold

• Key Features and Benefits

Figure 4 - Mimosa NearPoint eDiscovery Console