News

ISVs Release SharePoint 2010 Tools

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 08/01/2010

Now that SharePoint 2010 is shipping, the third-party market for migration and management tools is heating up. Many vendors have launched new tools aimed at easing migration and improving management beyond the capabilities of the tools built into SharePoint 2010.

Others have released wares and services to take advantage of the newly added SharePoint capabilities, such as social networking, improved integration with external data sources, extended content management, and the ability to create individual and workgroup sites.

When it comes to migration, ISVs say they're seeing high demand for such tools, in part because Microsoft only offers basic tooling. More to the point, though, interest in upgrading to SharePoint 2010 is high.

"We see it going from 0 to 60," says Rick Pleczko, president and CEO of SharePoint tools ISV Idera. "We're amazed at the amount of demand we've had." Pleczko says demand for SharePoint 2010 is outpacing that of SQL Server 2005, until now the most widely upgraded platform in the seven-year history of Idera.

Looking to bolster its portfolio of SharePoint administration tools, Idera, during the recent Tech•Ed North America show in New Orleans, said it had acquired iDevFactory, a supplier of security administration software. Idera, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, says it has 7,000 enterprise customers ranging from small to the largest of shops. The addition of iDevFactory gives Idera a tool that will give admins and systems auditors a view of the security of the SharePoint environment, according to Pleczko.

"It allows you to manage the rights, managements and permissions to documents and content stored in SharePoint," Pleczko says of the iDevFactory software. "It can create reports that tell who can have access to what, and what can be accessed by whom, and then it allows you to do audit checking to make sure your permissions are correct. It also can do things like find dead accounts from people who've left the company. It's a fairly rich product."

Formerly known as the iDevFactory Universal SharePoint Manager, the product is now known as the Idera SharePoint Security Manager. In conjunction with the acquisition, Idera is launching a new release to support SharePoint Server 2010. The new release adds support for multiple forms management and the ability in SharePoint Web parts to delegate functions to end users. For example, a help-desk worker can determine who has access to specific systems, says Julia Hall, an Idera director.

The new release starts at $4,995. Pleczko says the team of iDevFactory, which consists of "less than 10" employees, will join Idera. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The deal is the second recent acquisition for Idera, which also acquired the Sonar performance management tool from Binary Wave Ltd. in October. Binary Wave is a SharePoint consultancy.

Idera is not the only SharePoint tools vendor looking to bolster its portfolio. Axceler, a SharePoint administration software supplier, announced in June that it had acquired echoTechnology, a provider of SharePoint migration tools.

"The most important thing to SharePoint admins is migration," says Gail Shlansky, director of product management at Axceler. Axceler developed the recently released Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010, which supports migration from multiple sources, including SharePoint 2007 and 2003, Lotus Notes and file shares, she says.

"The migration from SharePoint 2003 to 2007 was quite complex because Microsoft really didn't provide much of an upgrade path, and a lot of the functionality with the two releases was quite different," Shlansky explains. "The migration from 2007 to 2010 is better, but still there are a lot of challenges."

Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010 includes real-time collection of critical configuration data, allowing for discovery and planning for migrations where there are known risk issues, according to Axceler. It includes detailed analysis reporting and has a rules engine, as well as a core migration engine designed for consolidating the various platforms. It will be available this quarter.

During Tech•Ed, Axceler also released a new version of its ControlPoint administration and configuration management tool, certified for the new SharePoint 2010 release.

Also at Tech•Ed, Quest Software Inc. launched Server Administrator for SharePoint, which allows IT professionals to view the server configurations and settings of both SharePoint 2007 and 2010 systems. The tool is designed to let administrators optimize performance and determine risks associated with configurations. It also has reporting capabilities that help determine whether a 2007 configuration is suited for migration to SharePoint 2010.

The software, available now, is priced at $1,495 per server. It arrived just weeks after Quest released Site Administrator for SharePoint, which helps ensure availability, security and compliance. With Site Administrator, admins can set policies and permissions and generate consolidated reports of log data for compliance purposes.

Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Metalogix Software Corp., another key provider of SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange Server administration software, released Metalogix Migration Manager for Blogs and Wikis. The tool is designed to migrate content from blog sites (such as Google Blogger, WordPress, Telligent and Wikimedia, or any other blog that supports the MetaWebLogAPI standard) to Office SharePoint 2007 and 2010 file types. It's priced at $2 per page migrated.

Metalogix, which only connects to SharePoint through supported Microsoft APIs, also released SharePoint Site Migration Manager (SSMM) 2010. The tool, which starts at $6,995 per admin, uses Windows PowerShell scripting to transition systems and content from SharePoint 2003 or 2007 to the new release. The company says SSMM is suited for all migrations.

AvePoint Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, released DocAve Software Platform version 5.5, a suite including administration, storage optimization, reporting and testing, real-time replication and integration, and migration tools.

Another Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Tzunami Inc., released an upgraded version of Tzunami Deployer for SharePoint, a migration tool designed to move content from a variety of enterprise content management systems to SharePoint 2010. The graphical UI of Tzunami Deployer supports drag-and-drop editing and offers automated migration procedures. In addition to old versions of SharePoint, file shares and Exchange public folders, Tzunami Deployer supports migrations from EMC Documentum, EMC eRoom, PlumTree/AquaLogic, Hummingbird DM, Lotus Notes and custom repositories, according to the company.