StoredIQ Support for Microsoft SharePoint

The growth of SharePoint within enterprises over the last few years has been remarkable.  By mid-2007, SharePoint was experiencing 35% year-over-year growth.  In 2008, Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates, remarked that SharePoint was the fastest-growing product ever in Microsoft history and he expected sales of over 100 million licenses by mid-2008.  By 2009, an IDG survey showed that 62% of CIO’s said that SharePoint was a critical component of their technology portfolio and would be expanding its use in the future.  And another survey from ESG showed that half of companies with more than 1,000 users were experiencing a SharePoint data growth rate of 41% or higher annually.  Along with this explosive growth, however, comes additional complexities vis-à-vis eDiscovery and information governance.  Unlike most content repositories, the data within SharePoint is complex and ambiguous, and must be comprehended and managed uniquely. The release of SharePoint 2010 promises to amplify all of these issues by introducing social interactions.

StoredIQ Technical Highlights

To realize the full benefits of proactive information management, SharePoint must be holistically understood.  StoredIQ achieves this understanding by providing in-depth indexing of the entire SharePoint ecosystem. Although document libraries typically contain the most ESI, they are not the only sources of content within SharePoint. Thus, to ensure a complete and comprehensive analysis of SharePoint, StoredIQ provides an index of text and over 100 attributes for SharePoint Blogs, Wikis, User Profiles, Comments, Discussion Boards, Calendars, Tasks, Contacts, Issue Trackers, Announcements, Surveys, Links, Project Tasks, Picture Libraries, Records Center and Document Libraries.  

Because SharePoint is primarily focused as a worksite collaboration facility, one of the more challenging issues surrounding eDiscovery involves understanding the concept of “custodianship”.  In reality, users can create and/or view content across multiple SharePoint sites that are scattered across the enterprise. The StoredIQ solution allows you to easily adjust the scope of custodian searches – giving you the choice of searching across all data that a user created or all data that a user can access. Letting Legal and IT teams to work together to determine what a reasonable definition of a custodian is and ensuring that all pertinent ESI is captured.

The complexities don’t stop once you find a responsive piece of data. As an example, a blog may have several threaded comments (and nested replies) by several different authors.   And, the blog (or comments) may have an attachment.  This attachment may be an archive file (ZIP) that contains several different documents. In this case if one of the documents in the archive or even one of the comments were responsive to a search, providing it without the context of where it came from would be of little value to the end-user.

Image: StoredIQ viewer for SharePoint

However, using the proprietary StoredIQ viewer for SharePoint, the content and complete hierarchical structure of SharePoint is displayed for any object, providing complete context for users when navigating complex SharePoint environments.  Thus, after identifying a document that is responsive, the StoredIQ viewer will display (in an easy-to-navigate hierarchical tree structure) the blog, comment, and attachment that contain the document of interest, providing full, navigable context to the user.

Finally, when it’s time to collect or export data for review the StoredIQ solution provides a wealth of options, allowing IT and Legal stakeholders to get exactly what they need. Users can decide whether they want related objects, version histories or linked items in order to provide even deeper context. Links are rebuilt to keep navigation intact throughout the review process. And, as with all actions performed through StoredIQ, the entire interaction between StoredIQ and SharePoint is exhaustively logged and recorded, providing comprehensive, defensible audit trails.

Summary

StoredIQ’s deep integration with SharePoint enables a complete and comprehensive understanding of, and collection from, this multi-use data source, including its collaborative content.  And yet, with user-focused technologies, analysis and review of objects is straightforward, expediting and facilitating information management for eDiscovery and information governance.