If you asked me to start listing the third party vendors who offer some kind of backup and archiving solution for an on-premises implementation of SharePoint, I wouldn’t know where to start -- there are a number of them. But if you asked me to name the vendors who offer the same solution for a hosted version of SharePoint, like Office 365, there’s only one I can think of -- MetaVis Backup.  MetaVis Backup is the newest tool to come from MetaVis, a provider of information management tools for SharePoint. It works as a standalone solution or can be combined with the MetaVis Architect Suite which includes Architect, Migrator and Classifier. MetaVis Backup takes its place easily among the backup and archiving providers for on-premises SharePoint, but it’s the ability to support cloud-based SharePoint implementations that really make it stand out.

You've been there, you're looking for good analytics, but every tool you seem to run only tells you what it can find in the IIS logs. You are interested in the content and users together not just by itself. It's not that hard to find out who your top users are, you want to know if they are doing good things or malicious things. You want to know how the environment itself is performing. Just because people are hitting the pages, doesn't tell you how adoption itself is going. With Adoption and engagement being the ultimate goal, Nintex Analytics is peering directly into what is being stored, used, searched, checked out, by whom, and where we are in the workflow.

There's an old adage in IT that 'nothing ever goes away'. Retiring legacy systems is a painful, often expensive process, mostly because every system has some useful information in it, but it’s hard to distinguish jewels from junk within that information. There are times when migrating all your content and cutting over to a shiny new system is the right thing to do, and there are many strong content migration products on the market. Sometimes, however, a total migration is simply not necessary nor useful.

Why use a SharePoint migration tool when you can upgrade using the built in upgrade methods? Maybe you want to skip 2007 going from 2003 to 2010, or get out of your MOSS enterprise and move into Standard or even WSS. Maybe you want to get out of a site definition or template or from one language template to another. Another reason to use a migration tools is if you already built a rock solid 2010 deployment and just want to get the data moved in. May be you’re finding that moving data on your own with the import or export is changing dates and making you “own” everything… Built in upgrade is designed to get from point A to B, without transformation. But transformation may be your goal.

Since Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an application platform, not just an application, maintaining and managing a SharePoint farm requires many skills. The level of complexity is comparable to SAP, although SharePoint does much more than SAP. The required skills are so broad it’s almost impossible to find them in one person. However, most of what’s required can be found in two roles: System Administrator and SharePoint Development Leader (in many environments, some parts of the System Administrator role can be handled by standard server operation procedures (anti-virus, firewall, etc.).

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For server administrators, backup and restore processes are essential in production environments. This is obviously no different for SharePoint farms, but out-of-the-box (OOTB) features for backup and restore are certainly lacking in WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. The Selective Restore Manager Pro from Metalogix is one such product that aims to fill the void left by Microsoft.