What’s New in DocAve 6: Universal Tree

As a former SharePoint administrator, one of the things that excited me the first time I saw DocAve was the time savings it offered. As we all know, SharePoint’s delegated administration architecture makes it easy to drive responsibility for managing the “knobs and switches” for site collections, sites, lists, libraries, etc. down to business users. Maintaining a centralized, top-down administration visibility and control of SharePoint, however, can be a cumbersome and manual effort as we visit countless settings pages across many SharePoint objects. DocAve is a boon to administrator efficiency, largely because of a particular interface element in DocAve – the “Tree”. The Tree allows an administrator to navigate to any level of any SharePoint farm they are managing, and take action on that scope all from a single console. The Tree even allows admins to select multiple scopes to manage at the same time: ​

The Tree has been in DocAve for years, so why bring it up now? Part of what makes DocAve such a fantastic choice as a management platform for SharePoint governance is the broad set of tools it offers administrators. For example, I may want to change settings and permissions on a particular site collection, and configure storage optimization settings for that site collection, and configure archiving for that site collection, and set up a custom backup plan for that site collection. DocAve has always offered me the ability to do all of these things from a single administrative console, but now with DocAve 6’s universal tree, working between DocAve tools is easier than ever. It works like this…. Navigate to the desired site collection in the tree for DocAve’s “Central Admin” tool to configure settings and permissions for a Site Collection:

Then hop over to the “Storage Manager” tool to configure BLOB externalization and note that the universal tree maintains exactly the same scope selection as you had in Central Admin:

Then, navigate to Archiver to configure archive rules for this site collection – again, note that DocAve keeps the tree selection consistent:

And, finally, it’s over to Granular Backup where we can set up a specific backup plan and schedule that is relevant for this site collection – again, the universal tree is expanded to exactly the same scope:

Ultimately, the Universal Tree in DocAve 6 is part of a larger effort to take the operational efficiency of DocAve to another level. Now, not only does DocAve allow you to execute management tasks with much greater efficiency than these same tasks would require in native SharePoint, the admin workflow within DocAve itself is enhanced. Bottom line: A good thing just got better. For a five-minute video that shows our Universal Tree in action, check out the demo I shot here.