We have some specific concerns about the performance of Objective ECM and would like to clarify if these are Objective (now on 8.1) issues or implementation issues:
1. SEARCH is very weak in terms of prioritizing results (old versions of documents, multiple versions,…)
2. LARGE OBJECTS (>10MB!) difficult to view, retrieve over WAN
3. UPGRADE (v6 to v7, then two years later v7 to v8), nightmare: took weeks each time (and expensive in specialist supplier resource bought in) including complex timetabling of client upgrades for Windows and MS Office across the organisation.
Any experience or insight you can offer will be appreciated.
These concerns are a mixture of objectives and implementation aspects of a need-to-be-defined governance plan:
1. SEARCH - First and foremost, search won't happen overnight and not without a functional information architecture (IA). "Garbage in garbage out": search result (Output) is only as good as the users' Input. The scope of IA should start small at the team level for proof of concepts and lesson learned then gradually move up for a wider scope. An IA plan should involve the compliance, legal teams, and business stakeholders as well as end-users to gather the file plans, business needs and pain points. Search is both the objective and implementation matter.
2. LARGE OBJECTS - There is no one solution fit all for storing large objects. This is more than just a SharePoint limitation but a backend server, content database, and network's. A few potential solutions to consider are separation of content databases, use of Remote Blob Storage (store objects in file share rather than SQL), or break files into smaller objects in the first place. Large objects storage is an implementation issue.
3. UPGRADE - Have you considered leveraging Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)? SharePoint Online and Azure hosting can take care much of the upgrading headaches and complexity. Despites the hype, services in the Cloud will eventually take off in Enterprises as Microsoft (top down) and ISVs (bottom up) continue to push the Cloud. IT upgrade involve both objective and implementation concerns.
Hi, I work at Objective and although these questions are not in my domain I can give some advice.
1. The search engine is Exalead CloudView and there is a browser based administration interface. I would suggest taking a look at the Exalead documentation.
2. Objective is designed to have a distributed server architecture for WAN support. It sounds like this is not the case here.
3. Upgrades have been identified as a point of pain and we have focused on improving. 8.2 is the first major step forward and each release will improve the situation.
Let me know if you need any documentation or have further questions.