ECM On SharePoint Part 2: Scalability Through Extensibility

By Trevor Hellebuyck (COO), BlueThread Technologies, Inc.

BlueThread's StoragePoint addresses this challenge. StoragePoint deploys as a standard SharePoint Records Center feature and allows for the externalization of content to any network addressable storage (NAS) and even compliant devices such as EMC Centera. This allows for large volumes of content to be managed by SharePoint while keeping the underlying content databases to a manageable size. Further, StoragePoint is completely seamless to the user. Documents are accessed like any of piece of content within SharePoint's Libraries.

In addition to the obvious database manageability benefit, StoragePoint also addresses the regulatory compliance needs of many organizations, most notably those in the financial services and healthcare sectors that operate under regulatory guidelines such as SOX and HIPAA that require content declared as a record to be unalterable. By extending the MOSS Records Center capability delivered in SharePoint 2007 to allow for the externalization of content to a WORMbased storage medium, StoragePoint provides a natural solution to achieving this requirement.

In many circumstances organizations fail to consult with experienced SharePoint consults due to SharePoint's relative ease of installation within a single server or small environment. You wouldn't attempt to install a legacy ECM solution without consulting with subject matter experts so don't make the mistake of assuming that the simplicity and approachability with even basic MOSS installations doesn't warrant best-practices consulting.