Microsoft Sharepoint server

[Darren S]

Anyone use it? We were looking into getting Sharepoint Server 2007. I take it that it works best with clients running Office 2007? A good 90%+ of our clients are running Office 2003 Standard edition.

Any good points/bad points?

We mainly want to centralise a lot of 'similar' documentation - and keep a better lid on the latest versions of documents, deleting old ones, etc.

Any feedback would be great!

Cheers,
D.

 

[@Spoonie]

Plenty of case studies here:

http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/prodinfo/evidence.mspx

 

[Daz]

It certainly integrates nicer with Office 2007 (especially Outlook 2007), but you don't particularly need 2007.

 

[Darren S]

Cheers guys - I'll look at that link as well Spoonie...

It pretty much seems to tick all the boxes that the MD was after. If Office 2007 is the way to go, then maybe we'll need to buy that in too.

D.

 

[dk]

we are using it and have a lot of customers looking to move to it, we run several seminars on it as its such a hot topic.

you can use sharepoint services to trial it, its a free download from MS as long as you have a windows server license.

I has the main part, you just can't do a lot of the fancy stuff or alot of the searching capabilities but it will give you a feel for the product.

 

[AlPacino]

I've just deployed sharepoint server 2007 to our company. It integrates fine with Office 2003 but you do get more features with Office 2007. We have several team areas, each with wiki's/links/discussions/to do lists/presentations and meetings in. It seems to work really well. Not found a good way to back it up yet so we just run it on WMWare and snapshot the server.

 

[Daz]

Not found a good way to back it up yet so we just run it on WMWare and snapshot the server.

BackupExec has a proper Agent, so that's pretty much the "best way" at the moment..

Of course, it's just SQL.. so you could just backup the database.. although the BackupExec agent backs up at the document level tho as far as I know, which is pretty useful!

 

[AlPacino]

Some of our guys tried sharepoint backup exec but found it had lots of problems. We use backup exec generally for everything else.

 

[Darren S]

Not found a good way to back it up yet so we just run it on WMWare and snapshot the server.

BackupExec has a proper Agent, so that's pretty much the "best way" at the moment..

Of course, it's just SQL.. so you could just backup the database.. although the BackupExec agent backs up at the document level tho as far as I know, which is pretty useful!

Daz, how does the speed cope with the backup at document level though? When we're backing up with Backup Exec 10d, the longest period we have is for all the piddly little files within Exchange mailboxes. The SQL databases in comparison simply fly though.

On a full backup, we surpass 400GB of data - which will undoubtedly rise in size once Sharepoint gets in. Especially with its 'prior version' document storage.

D.

 

[McBunny]

400gb isnt much data tbh lto4 will chew through it at a fair old rate even with brick level

 

[dk]

BackupExec has a proper Agent, so that's pretty much the "best way" at the moment..

Of course, it's just SQL.. so you could just backup the database.. although the BackupExec agent backs up at the document level tho as far as I know, which is pretty useful!

Daz, how does the speed cope with the backup at document level though? When we're backing up with Backup Exec 10d, the longest period we have is for all the piddly little files within Exchange mailboxes. The SQL databases in comparison simply fly though.

On a full backup, we surpass 400GB of data - which will undoubtedly rise in size once Sharepoint gets in. Especially with its 'prior version' document storage.

D.

if you are backing up exchange mailboxes then that is why its slow, its always has been, its very slow but very handy if you only want to restore a single mail. We do it this way at work but i have been told you should only really back up the message store and not do individual mails as it does take too long.

 

[dk]

400gb isnt much data tbh lto4 will chew through it at a fair old rate even with brick level

an interesting point about LTO4.

Tape has actually got to such a speed now that the systems feeding it the data simply cannot keep up.

The way LTO works it needs to be kept streaming to get its speed, and if the system stops sending it data it needs to stop, rewind, then carry on again, and this all takes time so it slows down.

It is found that to be able to stream data quick enough to the drive it needs to have been backed up to disk first, the to stream it fast enough you need to have a fair number of spindles and also a pretty beefy server, like with 4 processors and plenty of ram!

People used to think tape was slow, now its so fast that the servers can't even keep up unless you have a beast, which most companies backup server isn't.

So lots of people wonder why their lto tape drive isn't performing as fast as they thought it would, and thats why, becuase of this constant need to be streaming to be fast.