Review

From Network Computing Vol 18 No 05 September/October 2009

Ubiquitous access to business critical data is undeniably important, as organisations move towards a more collaborative style of working. When correctly conceived and delivered, such facilities are simple for users to work with and are highly effective; but this underlies the complexity that network staff must master and assure. Microsoft Office SharePoint helps to deliver these benefits and importantly, it provides the network team with some tools. Mimosa Systems has looked carefully at how SharePoint can be made even more relevant to users and technical staff alike, and their response is NearPoint. NearPoint responds to what some regard as the viral adoption of SharePoint and delivers enhanced capability, in areas including, Archiving, Recovery, Storage Cost Management, Retention Management andeDiscovery.

NearPoint is not a newcomer and it is version 4 for SharePoint that is under review. Fundamentally, NearPoint 4 aims to capture all types of content via the SharePoint Object Model and preserves the relationships between sites and content. That is to maintain the context of the data or business information, to enable greater accuracy. To save costs, it stores only changed document versions and performs single-instance storage across all contenttypes, including business documents, images and sites.

As you might expect, the management console is familiar and presents a very clear looking tree structure that signposts all of the available functionality. The main nodes in the tree are options for administration, archiving, farm level data recovery, monitoring, andreporting.

NearPoint archives those parts of SharePoint content that are designated as data sources enabled for capture. The source can range from an entire SharePoint farm to a SharePoint list. Each hierarchy element can be processed with unique capture settings and schedules, for which the latter has four policy types: capture,retention, stubbing and versioning.

The retention policy specifies how long each type of content, different formats etc, should be kept in the archive. The initial Default Retention Rule applies to all content types and specifies that all types should be retained in the archive indefinitely. While a good failsafe, this should receive early attention so that it more accurately reflects organisational policy requirements, and applicable regulation. Stubbing policies exist to reduce the cost of storage and as the default stubbing policy is not to stub, it's another area for early attention. It is possible to specify the number of versions of the archived files to be retained in the NearPoint archive with options for retaining all versions, just the most recent, or a specificnumber.

You won't be using the system for too long before you realise just how quickly data sets can be built up, and of course this begs the question of recovery; it is here that this product really scores. Recovery is either fine grain (FGR) or coarse grain (CGR). The latter is basically recovering everything as you would if you were migrating SharePoint to a new server. As this may be a clumsy way to recover a small number of documents, FGR usefully allows you to drill down and recover specific individualdocuments from the archive.

NearPoint is massively scalable, as it is built on the Microsoft performance grid architecture and in a large deployment multiples nodes can be created and then balanced to aid resiliency. Nodes can be added or removed as requiredin response to business needs.

The interface is uncluttered and its ease of use belies the absolutely huge depth of information that lies underneath; this in turn means that a comprehensive service can be offered without unnecessary IT complexity. For example rapid access to FGR offers obvious efficiency benefits. NearPoint offers clear business advantage through a rich and well composed feature set, and will significantly aid the delivery and management of effective SharePoint collaboration.NC

Product: NearPoint for SharePoint Version 4
Supplier: Mimosa Systems
Telephone: +44 (0) 118 963 7860
Web site:www.mimosasystems.com
Price: Stand alone £50 - £ 25 per user; add on order as part of NearPoint for Exchange or File Archiving, £35 - £15 per user

Review