Data Protection Options For Microsoft SharePoint Lag Despite Phenomenal Growth

By Jerome Wendt, DCIG LLC

At the turn of the millennium, email in general and Microsoft Exchange specifically became the must-have corporate application. Today businesses cannot imagine how they ever functioned without Exchange as it has become the most mission critical application in most organizations. Now that same experience is again repeating itself as companies come to understand the power of Microsoft SharePoint and what it means in terms of improved productivity for their employees. The bad news is that as more companies adopt SharePoint as a key application, they are encountering the same problems protecting and recovering SharePoint data that they used to encounter with Exchange.

The rapid corporate adoption of SharePoint was made evident by a recent InfoWorld article that cited a 2007 IDC survey. 61% of the 300 companies surveyed were deploying SharePoint across their enterprise while another 28% were expanding their use of SharePoint. But what that survey failed to examine was how companies were protecting SharePoint after they deployed it and what challenges they were encountering.