News

ISVs Release SharePoint 2010 Tools at Tech-Ed

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• June 14, 2010

One month after the release of SharePoint Server 2010, the third party market for migration and management tools is heating up. A number of vendors have launched or showcased new tools for the new SharePoint release, many of which took center stage at Microsoft's Tech-Ed North America conference, held last week in New Orleans.

Among those who have recently launched tools for SharePoint Server 2010 are Axceler, AvePoint Inc., Idera, Metalogix Software Corp., Quest Software Inc., Tzunami Inc. and Vyapin Software Systems Ltd.

ISV partners say they’re seeing high demand for migration tools in part because Microsoft only offers basic tooling -- but more pointedly, interest in upgrading to SharePoint 2010 is high.

"We see it going from zero 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 week at Tech-Ed said it has acquired iDevFactory, a supplier of security administration software as reported. Idera, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, says it has 7,000 enterprise customers ranging from small to the very largest of shops. The addition of iDevFactory gives Idera a tool that will give administrators and systems auditors a view of the security of the SharePoint environment, according to Pleczko.

The deal is the second recent acquisition for Idera, which also acquired the Sonar performance management tooling from Binary Wave Ltd. in October. The latter company is a SharePoint consultancy.

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

"The most important thing to SharePoint administrators is migra­tion," says Gail Shlansky, director of product management at Axceler. The company developed the Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010, released last week. The tool supports migration from multiple sources, including SharePoint 2007 and 2003, Lotus Notes and file shares, Shlansky 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, she 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, which allows for discovery and planning for migrations where there are known risk issues, according to the company. It also 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.

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 launched Server Administrator for SharePoint, which allows admins to view 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 if a 2007 configuration is suited for migration to SharePoint 2010.

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

Gold Certified Partner Metalogix Software, 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, Confluence and Wikimedia or any other blog that supports the MetaWebLogAPI standard) to Office SharePoint 2007/2010 file types. It’s priced at $2 per page migrated.

Metalogix Software, 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 admin­istrator, uses Windows PowerShell scripting to transition systems and content from SharePoint 2003/2007 to the new release. The company says SSMM is suited for all migrations, from routine to very complex.

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

Another Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Tzunami, released an upgraded version of its Tzunami Deployer for SharePoint, a migration tool designed to move content from a variety of enterprise content manage­ment systems to SharePoint 2010.

The graphical user interface 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, it supports migrations from EMC Documentum, EMC eRoom, Hummingbird DM, Plumtree/AqaLogic, Lotus Notes and custom repositories, according to the company.

Besides tools to ease migrations and administration of SharePoint, the release of 2010 will also spawn new offerings to bolster its capa­bilities. BA-Insight, for example, launched Longitude V4 for Microsoft SharePoint and FAST Search 2010 at Tech-Ed.

Logitude V4 is targeted at research analysts, sales management and other knowledge workers that need to find and use data that’s in multiple formats and locations. BA-Insight added a Silverlight Viewer and connectors to 30 different line-of-business systems.

The frenzied activity in acquisitions and product releases surrounding SharePoint migration and deployment is just one more indicator of the buzz that’s been building in the months leading up to the 2010 release. Partners looking to get in on the SharePoint 2010 action will find plenty of tools to help get that practice running, while customers have plenty of tools to choose from.