Massive quantites of data are generated by the core business of NSW's Land Property Management Authority (LPMA). Geospatial data gathered from ground surveys, as well as aerial photographs and satellite imagery, is used to produce a wide range of digital and hard copy products and services.

The NSW Land Property Management Authority (LPMA) is using AvePoint’s DocAve Storage Optimisation Suite to help deploy SharePoint to more than 1900 employees distributed among 90 locations throughout New South Wales.

LPMA has the immense responsibility of acting as the guardian of all land information in New South Wales (NSW), and has quickly become a world leader in this regard.

LPMA recognised the need to provide a single platform for all the geographically distributed employees across the state to access files, collaborate, and share information. Consequently, LPMA purchased Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. During the planning phase for the MOSS production farm and requisite information architecture, the matter of migrating all of its digital assets into SharePoint’s SQL Server-based content database quickly became an issue.

LPMA had approximately 8 terabytes (TB) of data residing in disparate file shares, and estimated that in the next two to three years it would add upwards of 3 TB to its existing content. In order to satisfy Microsoft best practices – no more than 100 gigabytes of content in each SQL content database – LPMA would then need to have at least 80 SQL content databases. Furthermore, migrating all this information into its MOSS environment could leave the LPMA susceptible to business disruption and data loss if any of the documents, including vital GIS (geographic information system) data did not successfully transfer.

In early 2010, LPMA discovered AvePoint’s DocAve Connector for SharePoint, which enables the “attachment” of network file-share content to SharePoint, so end-users can leverage the platform to manage and present all of their file system data – without having to migrate it into SharePoint’s content databases.

With DocAve File Share Connector deployed, LPMA swiftly attached its 8 terabytes of content to its MOSS 2007 deployment. The organisation still plans to migrate some content and data into SharePoint – including content for My Sites and Workspaces – but it is now only considering two or three content databases as opposed to the 80-plus for which it originally planned.

“We were able to shave between 9 to 12 months off of our original timeline for our SharePoint rollout”, said Dr. Steven Woodhouse, Manager of Technical Services at LPMA. “We will have a fully operational SharePoint deployment by the end of this calendar year. Without DocAve, that would have been extended to the end of 2011.”

It is critical companies embracing SharePoint properly plan for efficiently managing storage resources and content lifecycles. AvePoint’s Storage Optimisation Suite completes the storage and content lifecycle management picture, so organisations can take full advantage of SharePoint for success.

As more Australian organisations adopt Microsoft SharePoint, administrators are searching for strategies to optimise the platform’s storage capacity.

More organisations throughout Australia are quickly adopting Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies as the platform upon which they are connecting their people, processes, and information. An ideal platform for the presentation and management of enterprise-wide content and data, businesses look to SharePoint so their knowledge workers can better collaborate and manage mission-critical business initiatives.

Natively, SharePoint uses a unified storage infrastructure utilizing the SQL Server database. Though it is an efficient database technology, using SQL as SharePoint’s backend poses unique challenges for organisations looking to shepherd terabytes of legacy data. IT administrators must address three separate challenges when planning their strategies for best utilising its SharePoint storage – unstructured data, legacy content, and inactive content.

Unstructured data includes non-relational data streams – also known as Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) – such as Word documents, PDF files, video files, and other unstructured data. Considering more than 95 percent of the data a typical organisation uploads into SharePoint are BLOBs – and SharePoint has the capacity to hold documents of up to several megabytes in size – the platform’s SQL input/output performance can suffer when overburdened. Furthermore, organisations have volumes of legacy content stored on myriad file shares, legacy databases, and other storage devices. While most would like to unify management and presentation of this legacy data via their SharePoint deployments, many companies do not necessarily want to migrate this data into their SharePoint environments.

Finally, as SharePoint is utilised by end-users, the “dormant” data – content no longer actively used by the organisation – grows exponentially relative to the active content. Natively, all this data will be sitting in SQL servers, which can slow down SharePoint environments and potentially damage end-user adoption.

As such, organisations must make an important decision: Shall they continue to purchase additional SQL Servers to meet demand, take the time to write custom solutions utilising Microsoft’s External BLOB Store Provider or Remote BLOB Storage API for storage optimisation, or look to a third-party vendor to optimise storage and craft automated content lifecycle strategies?

Many organisations have turned to AvePoint’s DocAve Storage Optimisation Suite – DocAve Extender, DocAve Connector, and DocAve Archiver – to optimise content databases, present and manage file shares via SharePoint without the need for import, and automate intelligent content lifecycle management, respectively.

For more info on AvePoint’s DocAve Suite, visit www.AvePoint.com.au or contact AvePoint Australia: Tel: (03) 9620 0200 Email: Sales_AU@avepoint.com.