MetaVis Feature of the Day: OneDrive for Business Management

OneDrive for Business management screen is a part of MetaVis Platform. This simple wizard displays all users in Office 365 tenancy with the information about whether OneDrive for Business personal site has been created for each user. The wizard allows to export this information as a report to Excel spreadsheet. The wizard also allows to mass provision OneDrive for Business personal sites for multiple selected users.

In addition to this, MetaVis OneDrive Management Suite can help to load content to users personal sites using a central administrator location from file systems, network shares, shared on-premises or hosted SharePoint sites, Google Drives, SharePoint My Sites or other OneDrive personal sites.

Please visit http://www.metavistech.com/product/onedrive-management to read more about MetaVis OneDrive Management Suite.

MetaVis Feature of the Day: SharePoint Visual Topology

SharePoint Farms as well as Office 365 tenancies have complex hierarchical structures. Many products of MetaVis Platform organically, by the virtue of software organization, provide a neat way to visualize this structure. Almost every product of MetaVis Platform allows to start exploring SharePoint Farms starting with Central or Tenant Administration and drill down to WEB Applications, Site Collections, sub-sites hierarchies, lists and folder trees inside the lists displaying all these objects as nodes of the tree on the screen.

True, that the main objective of the platform is to perform some actions with these hierarchies like move or migrate sites, backup site collections or manage security. However, the mere capability to visualize farm structure on the screen with interactive expanding of any node WEB Application or Folder one alike is a value-able addition to SharePoint administrators tool box. MetaVis Architect Suite can even visualize site content types, fields and lists relationships as well as site map in a site collection on graphical two-dimensional entity-relationship diagram.

All these functions work well with all SharePoint versions, with no server side agent installed on the servers, for on-premises, cloud of Office 365 environments.

Please visit http://www.metavistech.com/category/architect-suite for more information about MetaVis Architect Suite for SharePoint.

MetaVis Feature of the Day: Actions in Administrator

MetaVis Administration Suite is not just a monitoring and reporting application (which is interesting function by itself). The real power of MetaVis Administrator is in the ability to change SharePoint environment for multiple selected objects at a time. Using the software, SharePoint administrators can mass change lists properties like versioning or content approval settings, grant or revoke permissions, backup or archive sites and even move lists to the other location – all of it for multiple objects simultaneously. This is a real time saver.

At the same time, graphical interactive dashboards allow quickly locate objects that need attention by drilling down through farm or tenancy hierarchies looking for specific parameters like rate of change or volume of access.

MetaVis Administration Suite works for on-premises or cloud SharePoint servers alike including Office 365 and OneDrive for Business tenancies. It requires no server side installations even for on-premises servers and is a perfect choice for managing hybrid on-premises and cloud environments.

Please visit http://www.metavistech.com/category/administration-suite for more information about MetaVis Administration Suite.

 

MetaVis Feature of the Day: Organize SharePoint Farms

Left in ungoverned state when too many many people can create sites SharePoint farms tend to grow to disorganized structures that are hard to navigate, manage and secure. Sometimes it is not bad because at the initial phase of introducing SharePoint to the organization it might be desirable to have this organic, almost viral, grow of SharePoint use. Introducing governance policies and rules helps to mitigate the organization problem with the ongoing farm growth. However, the existing disorganized structure remains. MetaVis Migration Suite provides an excellent way to restructure existing SharePoint farms into new manageable scheme.

For example, take a sub-sites somewhere deep in the site hierarchy and promote it to a new site collection together with all its sub-sites, lists, content, permissions and even navigation and look and feel. Alternatively, do the opposite operation: take a site collection and move it all as a sub-site of the other site collection. MetaVis Migration Suite can help to rearrange lists from different sites or site collections into a single location. It can also help to split large and messy site into several logical sub-sites or site collections every time taking vital structural information like permissions, fields, content types or workflows with lists and sites to their new location.

MetaVis Migration Suite works with on-premises and hosted SharePoints alike including Office 365 shared sites and OneDrive for Business tenancies. The desktop application is easy to install (no server side agents required) and looks much like Windows Explorer offering hierarchical representation of SharePoint farms with intuitive drag-and-drop or copy/paste interface.

Please visit http://www.metavistech.com/category/migration-suite for more information about MetaVis Migration Suite.

 

 

 

MetaVis Feature of the Day: File Upload to SharePoint for End Users

MetaVis Information Manager Enterprise User Edition is a tool embedded right into SharePoint library ribbon toolbar available for all SharePoint farm users with a certain permission level. Click on the toolbar button leads to a simple wizard that allows to select files from the file system to upload. Second page of the wizard is a properties editing screen similar to the one that appears when editing item properties. This screen allows to define values for uploaded files fields or copy them from the file properties (created, modified dates and users, folder names, etc). At the end, the wizard uploads selected files and folders to SharePoint library, assigned field values specified on the upload wizard, optionally preserves files original authorship and retention data, checks in the files if necessary and reports errors and deviations if any.

MetaVis Information Manager Enterprise User Edition is a powerful tool to organize company wide move from traditional file shared to SharePoint. In addition to this, MetaVis Information Manager Enterprise User Edition could be utilized as an integral part of organization workflows involving periodic massive upload of content to SharePoint locations. MetaVis Information Manager Enterprise User Edition could be used in combination with native SharePoint Content Organizer rules integrating with broader content governance activities.

Major benefits of MetaVis Information Manager Enterprise User Edition include its easy deployment for multiple users of the organization and simplicity to train users to use it because of its nature of being a native SharePoint solution.

Please visit http://www.metavistech.com/product/information-mgr-enterprise for more information about MetaVis Information Manager Enterprise User Edition.

 

MetaVis Feature of the Day: Content Upload to OneDrive for Business

MetaVis Platform offers multiple alternative solutions to onboard existing content to OneDrive for Business tenancies scaling from self-service applications intended for the end users and progressing to full featured enterprise software for centralized mass upload of high volume of content owned by multiple employees of the organization. Let’s discuss some of the approaches

1. In many cases companies create a folder for every user in the company on a network share to store their content. MetaVis OneDrive Management suite allows to take all these folders and upload them to the corresponding users OneDrive for Business personal sites using one central location. MetaVis platform allows to use user mapping to match users from different user directories, produces summary log files, enables full scaled or granular migrations for the selected group of users at a time.
2. In the similar fashion, MetaVis OneDrive Management Suite can upload content from Google Drive accounts as well as from SharePoint on-premises My Sites to corresponding OneDrive for Business personal sites. In addition to its regular enterprise features associated with these kind of migrations the platform allows mapping of permissions from Google Drives, includes versions and maintains Sharing hierarchy with Shared with Me area.
3. In addition to mass level migrations performed for multiple users in the organization, MetaVis OneDrive Management Suite allows to copy individual files and folders from file systems, SharePoint shared sites (on-premises, hosted or Office 365), Google Drives, My Sites or other OneDrive for Business personal sites to the selected OneDrive for Business personal sites. This function allows administrators to reorganize content into its proper locations
4. In addition to enterprise level migrations performed from the central location by the administrator for all (or multiple) users in the organization, MetaVis OneDrive Management Suite allows individual users to upload their files to their own OneDrive for Business personal sites from network shares, local computers, Google Drives, My Sites, shared SharePoint sites (on-premises or cloud)
5. MetaVis platform also includes Office 365 App that allows individual users to upload files from File Shares to their own OneDrive for Business personal sites using native SharePoint GUI

Please visit http://www.metavistech.com/product/onedrive-management for more information about MetaVis OneDrive for Business Management Suite.

 

MetaVis Feature of the Day: Cleaning up SharePoint Users

MetaVis platform includes Orphaned Users report that can find all users in site collection or server farm who are deleted or disabled in the corporate Active Directory. There are several scenarios that could lead to such inconsistency. First, users could be disabled in the Active Directory by mistake and it should be fixed. Also, the users might not be with the organization anymore. In this case, MetaVis offers tools (both interactive and static reports) to analyze permissions that users still have in the site collection and either remove these “orphaned” permissions or transfer them to a new user.

There is also a Content Inventory report that can identify the content owned by the orphaned user. Administrators can keep the ownership of the content for the historical tracking purposes, transfer the content ownership to the other user in the company, potentially even relocating the content to the other location like OneDrive personal workspace. Administrators can alternatively archive the content that belong to the orphaned user to free more storage and improve service usability.

All these functions work to on-premises and hosted SharePoint versions 2007, 2010 and 2013 (without the need to install anything on the server farm) as well for Office 365 tenancies.

Please visit http://www.metavistech.com/product/security-manager-sharepoint for more information about MetaVis Security Manager for SharePoint.

Please visit http://www.metavistech.com/category/architect-suite for more information about MetaVis Architect Suite for SharePoint.

MetaVis Feature of the Day: Pattern Based Search in SharePoint

It is easy to search through SharePoint farm for documents with certain URLs but try to identify documents with any URL. It is clear what to do to find documents with certain Social Security Number but try to find documents that contain any Social Security Number… and display all these numbers on the way. Meet MetaVis Informant – SharePoint tool that can identify documents in content databases following pre-configured rules and execute actions for the documents it finds.

MetaVis Informant includes dozens if not hundreds pre-built rules to detect documents with PII, PHI, postal addresses, ZIP Codes, driver licenses, URLs, links, dictionary keywords (optionally integrated with SharePoint Term Stores), following certain naming conventions, missing required information (like contract numbers), following some metadata patterns and many more. In addition to this Informant allows to define custom rules using regular expressions. Informant rules could be combined together using logical expressions like “Find documents that contain driver license number and keywords from this list but now keywords from that term set”.

Informant can identify documents following pre-configured policies perform any combination of the following actions

• Generate report with the identified documents
• Copy or move documents to certain location
• Upload files from file system to SharePoint or download them back
• Quarantine detected documents
• Change (add or remote) documents permissions
• Change or enhance document metadata

MetaVis Informant could be used to cross-users security checks to detect what could be seen by different groups of user accounts, audits, data loss prevention and other governance related activities.

MetaVis Informant is a client based tool that does not require server side agents. It works with File Systems, on-premises and hosted SharePoints as well as Office 365.

Please visit http://www.metavistech.com/product/informant for more information about MetaVis Informant.

 

MetaVis Feature of the Day: SharePoint Pre-Migration Analysis

MetaVis Pre-Migration Analysis is an Excel report generated by MetaVis Migrator for SharePoint summarizing the current state of the source environment (File System or SharePoint) from the migration perspective. The report analyzes different parameters of the source data that can affect migration planning. The report graphically outlines and color codes potentially problematic areas such as content volume, path length, custom WEB Parts, blocked file extensions, too large file sizes, unsupported characters in file names that will be replaced and many others. The report also indicates locations of complex objects like workflows or InfoPath forms.

While useful as a migration planning tool, MetaVis Pre-Migration Analysis might be used as a powerful method to quickly visualize data about the environment from content and structure perspective to plan even non-migration activities like branding, process engineering, governance or workflow implementation.

Please visit http://www.metavistech.com/category/migration-suite for more information about MetaVis Migration Suite.

MetaVis Feature of the Day: Scripts and Schedules

All MetaVis Platform operations that could be performed using GUI could also be executed using command line scripts, PowerShell, Unix or Mac OS X shell commands, executed periodically or at the certain time using Windows scheduler or Unix cron daemon. All scripts with necessary parameters are generated automatically using GUI after planning certain operation and then could modified for the shell commands accordingly. MetaVis Platform wizards also provides an intuitive graphical interface to Windows Scheduler with the ability to define repetitive or delayed tasks as well as monitor task execution with historical task execution logs.

This handy feature could be used for different purposes such as

• Perform periodic backup or content scan activities
• Execute incremental or delta migration during the time of transition to the new environment
• Migrate multiple site collections one ofter another one in a planned manner
• Move content between different locations as a part or cross-system workflows
• Generate system health and activity reports

Please visit http://www.metavistech.com/features for more information about MetaVis Platform Features.