Open Text: No More Multiples on SharePoint

By Irina Guseva | Published Oct 8, 2008

The Open Text — SharePoint saga continues, as the Enterprise CMS vendor announces new Open Text Storage Services for SharePoint.

This new service lets customers store Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 content in external storage devices, reducing wasted space by automatically detecting multiple instances of the same content.

Open Text/SharePoint Saga

This is not the first time Open Text gets cozy with SharePoint. And to think they're competing for the same Magic Quadrant…

Additionally, RedDot, Open Text's Web solutions arm, provides integration features for MOSS in the package is called MOSS 2007 Document Management Integration.

Open Text also offers integrated records management and archiving, content lifecycle management, a development framework for case management applications and specialized vertical market solutions.

Umm, wait, catching a breather… Other solutions for Microsoft include e-mail management capabilities; and Open Text Enterprise Connect, which lets users create customized views of content from multiple systems, such as SAP or Oracle, in Microsoft Outlook.

Open Text Content Services

Open Text Storage Services for SharePoint is the latest addition to the company’s Open Text Content Services product offerings. Open Text Content Services is a set of foundational tools that form the basis for the next generation of content management.

Saving Precious Space

In SharePoint servers, document content is stored inside dedicated SharePoint SQL databases, including what is known as binary large objects (BLOB) content that is not necessary for queries to the database. BLOB content can be stored outside of the SharePoint SQL database to save space.

Open Text Storage Services

Open Text Storage Services for SharePoint, which uses the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 External BLOB Storage API, provides the capability to store identical copies of documents in SharePoint only once. By accomplishing this single-instance archiving, customers can avoid the problem of multiple document copies that emerges any time SharePoint is used for team collaboration, or when independent teams collaborate in a decentralized, loosely affiliated manner.

Open Text Storage Services for SharePoint is compatible with all major storage providers including Hitachi Data Systems, StorageTek, Network Appliance, EMC, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems.

Compliance, eDiscovery and Document Retention

Open Text Storage Services for SharePoint can potentially lower overall storage costs and improve performance. In addition, it can also help enterprises meet regulatory and business requirements for information retention and eDiscovery.

Business critical content can be stored and secured in multiple physical locations, and SharePoint content can be stored on different storage devices — depending on the business and compliance needs of the content.

To learn more about this solution, visit Open Text’s Web site.