Today we announced the availability of the latest version of our software platform for Microsoft SharePoint governance and infrastructure management, DocAve 6. This latest installment, Service Pack (SP) 2, focuses on support for the latest and greatest version of SharePoint, SharePoint 2013. There are a few reasons I’m especially excited about this release, which I will elaborate on, but first I will give a bit of background on the release.
For those of you that might not be aware, part of my role at AvePoint in our Product Marketing department is speaking on AvePoint’s behalf at various conferences, serving as a product expert but also sharing experiences and best practices gathered from years of customer and partner meetings and engagements. This allows me to:
1) Keep an ear to the ground in the SharePoint Community, which is practically becoming more like my extended family every day, to track the latest activity in the marketplace.
2) Talk directly with customers and partners to ensure our products are meeting their needs, supporting a wide range of business cases for SharePoint, and incorporating that feedback and insight into our product releases and messaging. As such, I do travel on occasion, most recently to the European SharePoint Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. There I was able to attend sessions, including some great keynotes by top SharePoint experts, meet with some of our partners and customers, and even participate in a head-to-head migration shootout with some other SharePoint vendors.
I’ve had ample opportunity to talk with our partners and customers about this latest release, and the excitement has definitely been building since the first previews surfaced. The more I hear people talk about SharePoint 2013 and why it’s exciting for them, what’s changing, what’s still challenging, and what the new guidelines and recommendations are for configuration – whether for server topologies or otherwise – the more I anticipated our own release of DocAve 6 SP2.
Back in October – one month ahead of SharePoint Conference (SPC) 2012 – Microsoft made the exciting announcement that SharePoint 2013 reached the release to manufacturing (RTM) stage. AvePoint, as a close Microsoft partner, had already begun preparing our products for this latest release, and we were able to showcase those capabilities at SPC 2012. We worked furiously on the next phase of support for SharePoint 2013, going through our extensive quality assurance (QA) testing, to ensure that we would be right there with our customers as they looked to take advantage of the latest release. DocAve 6 SP2 is the culmination of that work.
While we’ve been offering 2013 support for some of our products, such as DocAve Migrator, in the form of a private beta program, we’re pleased to now make this much more comprehensive functionality set generally available through DocAve 6 SP2. We’re excited about all of the great new features and functionality SharePoint 2013 has to offer, and we’re proud to be a key partner in supporting our customers’ efforts to utilize and gain significant business value from this latest release.
Last week, I presented a webinar with Shyam Oza, our Product Manager for our migration and cloud offerings, entitled “Migrating to SharePoint 2013 with AvePoint”, which showcased the latest release and our ability to perform online or offline migrations from SharePoint 2010 or even directly from SharePoint 2007 (in addition to other legacy platforms) directly to SharePoint 2013. While the ability to seamlessly migrate existing content into on premises or online editions of the latest release certainly plays a pivotal role in supporting our customers’ deployments, this is only the beginning of the SharePoint 2013 story! At AvePoint, we are confident that we’re able to address any challenges that organizations may face in delivering seamless global collaboration and enhanced productivity while meeting compliance and governance challenges. With our migration tools, for example, the ability to restructure content enables our customers to better support all the ways they can gain value from SharePoint while addressing evolving information architecture requirements while complying with the latest guidelines and recommendations from both experts and Microsoft itself. By migrating content into SharePoint with DocAve SP2, we’re even granting our customers the ability to immediately begin taking advantage of SharePoint 2013’s Shredded Storage feature, which is not done automatically when content is upgraded natively (more to come on that in an upcoming post by Shyam).
We’ve been testing and evaluating various SharePoint 2013 features and functionality non-stop, and we will continue to add new features to our products that support SharePoint 2013. We look forward to taking the SharePoint 2013 journey with our community of partners and customers and are excited about all of the possibilities that the new platform has to offer!
Want to try DocAve 6 SP2 for yourself? Download a free trial today!
