- File name, e.g. anything containing the word “draft”
- Author, e.g. anything created by an employee who left the company two years ago
- Old versions, e.g. keeping only the most recent five versions of each document in the content databases
- Any custom metadata value, for further granular identification of content that should or should not be externalized
Some of you DocAve veterans may recall that AvePoint has provided a last accessed time rule – relying on the SharePoint Auditor – since the days of DocAve 5 Archiver. Ideally, though, SharePoint administrators should not be keeping all of the audit logs in the content databases indefinitely. Audit data is often known to grow exponentially, which could eventually start to affect SharePoint performance, especially in larger deployments with many users and a lot of activity. In DocAve 6 Service Pack 1, DocAve Storage Manager and DocAve Archiver featured a last accessed time criterion that tracked this data in our own DocAve stub database. Since it did not require the storing or summarizing of logs, it was extremely efficient, but it only worked on BLOBs that had already been externalized by DocAve. As such, it was geared more toward the management of tiered storage rules for already existing stubs and BLOBs. Meanwhile, for newly created stubs, the last accessed time of the stub would be updated to the stub creation time (that is, the time when the BLOB was externalized). Now with Last Accessed Time in DocAve: A HistoryDocAve 6 Service Pack 3, we offer an improved last accessed time rule. Same as in DocAve 5, this feature uses SharePoint audit data, only now it leverages the DocAve Report Center’s Audit Controller. This is more beneficial to the administrator because the Audit Controller retrieves the audit logs from SharePoint content databases and stores them in our own report database; SharePoint itself does not need to be touched in order for us to query audit data. DocAve Report Center also provides the ability to prune the audit data from our report database and store it on a file share, outside of SQL Server, for data retention and storage optimization.
A common concern around last accessed time data is that this timestamp typically gets updated by search crawls or other service account activity, preventing it from being a true indicator of when a file was last read by an actual user. DocAve Report Center’s Audit Controller addresses this pain point by allowing for selective, flexible retrieval of data from the SharePoint Auditor database. When a user configures an audit plan, he or she can enter the names of specific accounts to exclude, as such: [caption id="attachment_2862" align="alignnone" width="831"] Audit Controller


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