Project and Workspace Archiving & Restore – Cool custom tools!!

Over the past couple of days we discussed how to Archive and Restore projects using OOB features, best practices and considerations for associated Workspaces.

The manual approach for archiving and restore may work for smaller deployments or instances with small number of ‘live’ projects. But, if we have a medium to large deployment or we are in a situation where we simply have very many ‘live’ projects we may need to start thinking about automating some of the processes to streamline our operations. Archiving your projects and workspaces will not only help with the system performance but more importantly, your SQL database backups and disaster recovery where you might be mirroring or log shipping to another site. Whatever approach you take whether manual or automatic…keep your system ‘lean and mean’.

Here is some info on an automated ‘Project and Workspace Archive & Restore’ custom utility for EPM2007 & SharePoint Workspace that I worked on earlier. The key features are;
    Archive Projects with and without workspaces. The associated workspaces can be configured to be automatically migrated to another site collection either within the same App Pool/Content DB or to a completely different farm!! Note: You can even leave the workspace in its original location and the restore tool will automatically figure out where the associated workspace is at the time of restore and re-link it automatically.

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    The above figure should give you an idea of the flexibility when it comes designing your archiving and restore strategy!! It is totally flexible.

    Archiving Projects based on custom attributes and whether the project is INDEED complete. How often do we see PMs simply closing a project with remaining work and duration? The archiving tool will enforce that policy. See attached fig below.

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    Restore Projects with and without associated Workspaces automatically including re-linking;

• Firstly, the associated workspace will be restored.
• Next, the project will be be restored from the archive and automatically published.
• Finally, the project will be automatically linked to the associated restored workspace. How cool is that!! 

(click picture to enlarge)

We can also add in capability for user controlled archiving based on Project Attribute.

If this has wet your appetite then I suggest you contact us to see how we can help you with a solution that will work within your organization.

Hope this series of archive and restore posts has been useful. Your feedback is always welcome (pj@projectsolution.co.uk ). Let me know what you think.

Author: PJ Mistry