Bottomline of my story is that Microsoft indeed has not addressed the SQL storage issue with the arrival of SharePoint 2010 as Microsoft being a software company considers the connecting to all kinds of hardware a task for the hardware companies or for the software developers. STEALTH Software being a software developer has created a solution for it. A solution that will enable organizations to use SharePoint for the purpose that they got it in the first place. SharePoint (2010) is a worthy Enterprise Content Management system that users over the whole world love. It is actually bizarre that at the back-end SharePoint is ‘being held hostage’ by limited storage capabilities and where the main options are usually buy more expensive storage or preventing the upload of more content in SharePoint. I even heard of a situation at a big entreprise company that a mail was sent to users to delete content in order to lower the storage! Well, that is completely in line with the spirit of SharePoint…not! Using another (very expensive) content management system to be an add-on to SharePoint is actually also quite extraordinary, laying an unneccessary burden on the users (2 learning curves) and operational managers, not to mention the huge costs

There is a solution and it is actually not complex, but it requires guts to look at storage infrastructure in a different way, leaving the well-known traditional path. I have noticed also unbelieve: how can a storage infrastructure be only let’s say 30% of what we usually pay for? Well, what can I say: Times have changed. SharePoint is taking over Content Management world and The ‘Watercurtain’ Storage infrastructure will eventually replace the fileserver silo’s. Life will be less complex and cheaper..what else do you want?

If you would like more information, feel free to go to our site: http://www.synergy4.eu/resources/information-kit

PS Pat: by using external storage that is WORM-compliant like Caringo CAStor, EMC Centera, DELL DX Object Store and Hitachi HCAP you can use SharePoint as means to store your archived documents.

The key has always been that metadata is king. Therefore always backup metadata before content and always restore content before metadata. Nothing new. It also brings with it the potential of having orphaned files, for which the big boys have always had cleanup utilities.

Hopefully the SP2009 conference will give details of the ‘how’, so we know which path they are taking on this…

Let us know what you find, as EBS really doesn’t fit my current needs. Looks like I’ll be doing my own cut-down CMIS implementation at the moment.

From the MS ECM blog last year:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ecm/archive/2008/09/09/announcing-the-content-management-interoperability-services-cmis-specification.aspx

“When will Microsoft include support for CMIS into SharePoint (or other products)?

Of course, Microsoft’s goal (which is shared by all of the companies participating in the CMIS effort) is for the CMIS specification is to become the interoperability standard that we can incorporate into our products to reduce the complexity of managing & integrating multiple ECM systems… and today’s announcement is an important step in that process.

As the specification goes through the OASIS Technical Committee process and approaches a final 1.0 version, we’ll provide more information on when and how you’ll see support for CMIS for SharePoint and other Microsoft products.

Ethan Gur-esh, Program Manager.”

None provide two way integration of the Blob AND it’s metadata, and none provide it for the TWO enterprise DMS systems required.

So a custom SharePoint solution is the only option (with all the inherent risks that involves) that may be irrelevant by SP2010.

Come on MS – SharePoint is meant to enable collaboration between users AND other systems!