The SharePoint Sprawl

Marketing@Archon: ⁓ Customers, lot of enterprise customers use SharePoint very heavily. It provides a great, great, great function, right? SharePoint is a necessary evil, you know, but it's also a nightmare when it comes to compliance, you know, when an employee leaves, he leaves his SharePoint with the data and then takes off. We've been managing SharePoint for our company and I ideally go through this challenge every day. So we did think about like why can't we use an archival solution and probably like use Microsoft's own version, but there are certain associated risks and it just becomes very difficult to manage very quickly if you don't have the right kind of archival. What I would look for very specifically would be the ability to also ⁓ access the data without SharePoint. These are key capabilities that I would look for. what would your top three things should be. Hello guys, welcome to today's discussion on SharePoint Archival. ⁓ So SharePoint archiving is a very interesting thing, right? We talk a lot about archival, but SharePoint is kind of like, what would I call it? Day to day? No, it's like, you know, somebody, guest you don't want to have in your house, but you have to have, because, know, your mom will come beat you up if you send them out. SharePoint is a necessary evil, you know, ⁓ the way I see it. ⁓ Customers, a lot of enterprise customers use SharePoint very heavily. It provides a great, great, great function, right? You you can manage so much amounts of data. Users can have access to their information in cloud. It's just a fantastic solution, but it's also a nightmare when it comes to compliance. You know, when an employee leaves, he leaves his SharePoint with the data and then takes off. There could be potential sensitive information in there. ⁓ Over time, SharePoint sites don't get managed well. You don't really know what data anybody is going to put in their own SharePoints. And it just becomes very difficult to manage very quickly if you don't have the right kind of archival in place. then SharePoint also has this ability to grow really quickly. I had one of my own teammates actually upload a 300 GB video and like 10 of them in a single day. And that kind of broke our SharePoint rules. It's a very interesting ⁓ need to archive SharePoint information. think every enterprise definitely needs to consider when they start using SharePoint, they should also start considering what they need to do to archive information from SharePoint. ⁓ There are some very specific challenges that come with archiving SharePoint. But before we discuss about that, I want to start by talking about Microsoft own archival solution that comes with SharePoint. My first question would be why not just use that? Microsoft gives it, they own the SharePoint application. Why can't we just archive data through Microsoft's own SharePoint services? So Karthik, I've been managing SharePoint for a company and I really go through this challenge every day. So we did think about why can't we use an archival solution and probably use Microsoft's own version, but There are certain associated risks and unwanted factors. So first thing is like when you archive something, have to archive the complete site. You cannot archive a single folder document. They don't provide you with flexibility and that completely breaks the need for what can get archived. I simply end up doing like creating a sub-site, move my files to a sub-site and then the sub-site has to get archived and that cannot be done in a repeated fashion. So that ideally breaks down the entire reason why I would even. want to go for using Microsoft's old archival solution. And the second thing is, when the site gets archived, the access to the entire data sets that is residing in it is completely lost. So you have been holding a document, you have been accessing it, but the administrator archived that site and you completely lose visibility to it. And in case if you want a document to be brought back, you need to restore it and the restoration, the time comes in process and the cost associated with it is also doesn't seem to have that balance. the other factor is like the size of versions that you maintain for every document, the word document, the PPT that you create, that can cap up very soon. They have limitations on other controls, but the minimum is 100. And that, ideally. Yeah, but what is the challenge with actually implementing their own archive? mean, It's like paying double the cost. And the premium services is what usually gives you that flexibility. archive flexibility. Personally, I feel like if you're using their archive, you lose access to the data that's in the archive, which is a big challenge for me at least. ⁓ The other challenge that I would say becomes very troublesome is ⁓ the cost, of course. The cost of the archive is also pretty heavy. And the ability to not. able to granularly archive the information. Like if you're specifically looking to archive documents that are older than let's say five years, six years, a certain type of document only, those are not capabilities Microsoft provides. So those provide a very persistent challenge, right? Now that leads me to my real point. What do you have to look for when you're archiving a SharePoint application? What are the requirements a customer has to think when they try to archive data from a SharePoint applications? So the first question will be like, are you accessing it and who are the set of people who are accessing it? Absolutely. When you move it to an archival position, you need to make sure that the people continue to have the access. They do not get discount about where the file is. There are seamless connectivity is what I would might be factor in. The second thing is I don't want to have the ability to search for my data. So I'm used to accessing data from the start point. So preferably a button to I'll get back my data or at least view it in the proprietary solution that could potentially be the archive ⁓ would be some things that people would be looking for. See, the second thing is the ability to discover, right? Like if you are archiving a large SharePoint site or multiple SharePoint sites and you're looking to archive specific information, you know, the ability to discover and pull only those information when you archive is something that's going to be variation shell when you're looking for a SharePoint application archive application. Is that right? Yes, so see when contents are huge, the ability to search for them, the purpose for tagging and making the discovery is going to be one of the factors and an unmanaged site could make it a very big nightmare. See, there are certain point solutions where the only way to access the archive is to go to the stub which they leave when they archive the information, double click on it because it has a link to pull the original data back. But they're also right, the discoverability is lost because the metadata that the stub holds will just be the file name, not the content that sits within the archive. And you cannot really go search in the archive or do discovery in the archive. So those are capabilities that I feel is very important with an archive, right? Yeah, so we also have our own SharePoint archival solution and we have the same challenge that people have been asking for. How do I discover back? So every file has a metadata within the SharePoint. What if the stuff file can still retain that metadata? Make the discoverability still continue. But again, you don't have to retain the versions, the original file, but it's converted into a bite size component that can reduce the complete storage associated with it. Absolutely. But also the ability to search within the archive itself, right? Like not only depending on SharePoint to access the information, but the ability to access the information outside the SharePoint through the archive itself. also constitutes a very important feature, I'd say, of our ADS archive. Yeah, and we have extra features that are also added. For example, if you want to, you can opt for having the compliance policy self-managed for the information that gets added to the region, the industry, stuff like that. And the second thing is when you have the discoverable component available. you just don't look at through full text search. What if you want to look up for the meaning of the context of the rest of the summarization options or probably when you share the data, you wanted to share the information but not ⁓ showcase the PIA contents. So redaction, other things could also potentially become options that we could. That we offer and I think that a lot of customers, our customers use this too, The other important thing that I would like to talk about when it comes to SharePoint Archive, right? How do we maintain access? So there are a lot of shared points, especially when employees leave organizations that become orphaned and they still have to be managed for its retention period. ⁓ What do you think about that? That's an important requirement. Do you agree? Yes. So when we archive, there are a couple of ways in which we provide awareness. The user, the creator himself, he might have left the organization, but the record still resides on his name. We either offer a proxy or someone who can manage it that ideal happens even in SharePoint But when it comes into the archive we can now set up specific people to either access it manage it or have admin level permissions or only induce a level permissions these can all be provided and when when the data comes in we have the ability to look up for certain characteristics a rule based or retention policies can be applied and You can either set a fixed date or look up for information based on that you can tune your program to automatically choose the ideal retention period. Irrespective of whether it's a point solution or an enterprise-based archive, is the ability to manage the archive for its, I'm sorry, the ability to manage the data for its life cycle, right? And with SharePoint data especially, ⁓ purging becomes very important. If you can have a trigger-based purge or if it can have a proper set up retention policy that can manage the data within the SharePoint, I think that's gonna be very key. And to summarize, from my side, if I'm trying to buy a SharePoint archive solution or set up my enterprise archive and also archive SharePoint systems, in addition to the known capability requirements, the ability to still access the data from SharePoint and the ability to manage different types of data, what I would look for very specifically would be the ability to also access the data without SharePoint, the ability to manage the data on a both structured, or sorry, the ability to manage the data for its lifecycle, the ability to purge the information, the ability to access the information outside the archive, the ability to still continue using SharePoint while also being able to use the archive. I think these are my top features, I'm sorry. While preserving the metadata. While preserving the metadata, while having the ability to create context, while having the ability to ⁓ identify sensitive information. These are key capabilities that I would look for. What would your top three things should be? See, ⁓ like I want a seamless connectivity. So with a single click of a button, I should be able to like interconnect my SharePoint with the archive. So I should be able to like archive a file by a click of a button. And I should be able to access back the file similarly from SharePoint where I don't have to like jump between tools. So that's. That's something that would be top on my mind. Agreed. Agreed. Anyway, that's a very interesting discussion on SharePoint Archival. ⁓ If you guys have more questions, if you need to talk more about SharePoint Archival, feel free to reach out to us. Thank you guys. Thank you. Let's talk archival.