AvePoint pushes out DocAve 6 for Microsoft SharePoint management

AvePoint has made available a new release of its DocAve platform for managing SharePoint deployments, bringing greater scalability for large deployments, a user- interface overhaul,and extensibility to help integrators customise the platform to user requirements.

DocAve 6, available immediately, has a new look and feel based around Microsoft-style ribbon toolbars, greater support for multi-server SharePoint farms and has been designed with an API that exposes the platform's functions via web services.

"As people are using SharePoint more and more, they need a way to really enforce governance in a truly scalable, extensible way behind their platform and that's what we designed DocAve 6 around. Governance really shouldn't be that hard," said John Hodges, vice president of Global Account Product Management at AvePoint.

This release is also now completely designed around Microsoft technologies such as IIS, .NET, Silverlight and Windows Communication Foundation, according to the firm.

On the scalability side, DocAve 6 now boasts improved reach, with Hodges claiming it can be used to manage deployments of more than 150 SharePoint servers, while it integrates better with enterprise-class storage platforms such as Dell's DX Object Storage.

"From a scalability standpoint, you're going to be seeing a lot more joint reference architectures like this from us that offer incredible performance and cost savings," said Hodges.

DocAve 6 also works more closely with cloud-based platforms for fail-over of the SharePoint system to Amazon or Windows Azure and also works in the 'stretched farm' case, where customer datacentres are thousands of miles apart.

For extensibility, AvePoint said it will expose select services for each of the modules in DocAve 6, with an SDK set to be available in the coming months that will enable resellers and partners to extend the functionality of DocAve or connect it to other tools, as customer requirements dictate.

Another feature of DocAve 6 is greater support for centralised or delegated management of SharePoint farms, but also ensuring that such users abide by existing governance policies.

"A lot of organisations don't understand what it means to give an employee site collection administration privileges or site ownership. That comes with a lot of dangerous policies that can affect how SharePoint performs," Hodges explained.

DocAve is licensed based on the number of servers, but AvePoint does not publicly disclose pricing. However, existing customers will be able to upgrade to the new platform, depending on their maintenance contract.