Newsletter Optrium

DID YOU SAY SHAREPOINT?

Improving productivity is a major concern for all businesses. One of Microsoft’s major successes in this regard is the SharePoint integrated tools platform with annual financial results which make it one of its flagship solutions.

With more than 100 million users worldwide (France currently only represents 2% of that usage), this product has been enormously successful for both large companies and organisations, as well as smaller businesses. The most difficult part of the process is usually making the decision to use it in the first place...

SharePoint is a fantastic collaborative tool which facilitates easy information sharing. Everything which you might need for your project is available, whether that is business procedures or human resources, and it is all concentrated in a web interface which is continually updated.

Information sharing is improved through increased accessibility and intelligent

document versioning; this tends to replace information exchange by email , which, after all, was not designed for that purpose.

Among this collaborative tool’s possible uses, you’ll find dedicated internal sites, business applications which can be adapted as and when required, decision-making processes using the most recent online information, internal social networks, content management and of course simple information search. As a source and exchange of information, such platforms need specific additions which will allow the production team to manage them easily.

Migration 'to' or 'from', synchronisation between multiple sites, version upgrades; these are just a few of the areas which deserve extra mention. Metalogix, world leader in this field, meets these needs through a suite of solutions for SharePoint; we invite you to discover them for yourself very soon.

Happy collaborating!

Antoine Berthier
antoine.berthier@optrium.fr

STEVE MARSH, MÉTALOGIX MARKETING DIRECTOR, ANSWER TO OUR QUESTIONS

Optrium:How can the collaborative tool market, and especially the Sharepoint market be developed?

Steve Mash:I think the collaborative market is developing and at quite a fast pace. We’re seeing lots of new tools and ways of working together making their way into the Enterprise and SharePoint is embracing a lot of these.

The latest release of SharePoint has been built for deploying in the cloud. Updates to functionality will be more frequent. It works much better across different types of devices for example smartphones and tablets.

The acquisition of Yammer and the improved social features in SharePoint 2013. They have even improved the link between the desktop/client operating system, the authoring software (MSFT Office) and the collaboration platform through SkyDrive Pro. I think the last of these is the area that we will see a lot more movement as Microsoft responds to the rise of solutions such as Dropbox, Box and Huddle.

OP: What are the profiles of clients who use this solution? (number of servers, users…)

SM: SharePoint is a very horizontal solution therefore its customers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The launch of SharePoint Online as part of Office 365 has increased the accessibility of the platform to an even broader range of clients. It is typically the use of SharePoint that differs depending on the size of the company and the amount of time that they have been using SharePoint. Most customers start with basic document collaboration and information sharing between teams.

As SharePoint on its use matures within an organisation we often see an increasing number of workloads. Business Intelligence, structured document management, web content management or business processes are just some of the additional uses.

OP : What are the current issues faced by companies in this area? (requirements, problems…)

SM:The problems with collaboration in the enterprise have still not been solved. How often do we still see documents attached to emails? We also have to look at the collaboration boundaries that exist today and how they have changed. We are often now working with people from outside our own companies. How do we collaborate with them? This is why we still see email being abused. This is also why we have seen what started as consumer offerings for sharing information start to make inroads to the Enterprise. E.g. Dropbox.

Ensuring that we are getting the most out of our collaboration platforms is essential. We need to make sure that they appropriately support how our people work. We must also ensure that they can change as the working environment changes over time. But they also must ensure that we as companies and our information is safe. It is easy to create and share a document on a web-based file share. However, do we want this to be the way we share

OP: Where does Metalogix fit into this market and what needs are met by your solutions ?

SM:At Metalogix we empower organizations to get the most from their SharePoint investment. We allow our customers to rapidly make the move to SharePoint. Our Content Matrix product migrates and consolidates corporate information into the Microsoft platform. Or, if you have an older version of SharePoint, we enable you to easily move to the latest version.

Content Matrix does this in a flexible manner. This is not a simple movement from A to B. Content Matrix allows customer to reorganize and restructure their content and SharePoint as part of the migration. This means that mistakes with previous implementations are easily corrected during the move. It also means that customer take advantage of new functionality in the latest version of SharePoint from day 1.

But it doesn’t just stop there. SharePoint is a collaborative platform. By its nature it is therefore going to change and grow over time. As more content is added and more people start to use it. Metalogix empowers content owners to manage their content over time. SharePoint sites and list and the associated documents can easily be moved within SharePoint as business needs demand. Content Matrix also allows people to make the best use of their documents. Files can easily be tagged and classified to enable the entire organization to find and make better use of the information. And because this capability needs to be in the hands of the content owners we do all this directly within the SharePoint user interface.

OP: How do you see Microsoft Sharepoint develop in 2013 and how will Metalogix respond ?

SM :It has always been Metalogix goal to enhance SharePoint for our customers. We work very closely with Microsoft so we are able to develop our products in alignment with how SharePoint evolves. Therefore as Microsoft continues their journey to the cloud and for customers who wish to move and consolidate their enterprise content within the latest version of SharePoint, either in the cloud or as an on-premises solution, we will ensure that we can facilitate the transition for our customers and ensure that they can manage their content within SharePoint in the cloud in a way that suits their business needs.

FOCUS ON METALOGIX PRODUCTS - SHAREPOINT

WITH THE WIDE RANGE OF METALOGIX PRODUCTS FOR SHAREPOINT, WHY NOT OPT FOR THE CONTENT MANAGEMENT SOLUTION FROM THE MARKET LEADERS?

The range of Metalogix products for Sharepoint allows you to optimise production platforms by re-organising data, moving content and migrating version upgrades in the most intelligent way. It is available in four products:

- StoragePoint : Optimises content storage for SharePoint
- Migration Manager : Migrate and upgrade your SharePoint content quickly and easily from SharePoint 2003 or 2007 to 2010.
- Replicator : replicate and synchronise content across SharePoint farms
- Selective Restore : restore content in a granular and flexible way.

The reason why SharePoint continues to be so far ahead of other products on the content management market is because companies consider it to be the ideal (internal and external) online platform for collaboration and document management .

The success and performance of Metalogix Storage Point can be explained by four key principles:

Improvement and completion of the client’s investment in the platform

• Extend the functionality of the standard Microsoft SharePoint
• Focus on a rapid return on investment

Development of a close partnership with Microsoft

• Excellent compliance with Microsoft: API /Web services support
• Permanent cooperation with the Microsoft product teams
• Metalogix is a “Microsoft ISV Gold Partner”.

Remain the market leader in innovation

• Best solution for SharePoint migration
• Best Enterprise Class solution – remote BLOB storage for SharePoint (EBS/RBS)
• Best solution for supporting SharePoint online (Office 365)
• Performance: fastest migration
• Best Enterprise Class solution – SharePoint replication

Remain committed to customer service

• customer support which works 7 days a week 365 days of the year
• measure and monitor all incident tickets

From a technical point of view, SharePoint uses SQL databases to store everything: content, metadata, taxonomy, configurations...

The content of each SharePoint farm is linked to at least one database on the SQL server. You should also remember that the content is fixed and that 90% to 95% of the data content is made up of BLOBs (Binary Large Objects).