A controversy has been brewing within law firms for several years, as more and more documents have found their way into SharePoint, and IT departments wonder whether SharePoint could be a viable replacement for their current document management systems. Contributing to this controversy is Microsoft’s design decision to have SharePoint store documents in a SQL database rather than as individual files on a file server.
In this article I’ll discuss the case for moving SharePoint documents out of SQL Server, review Microsoft’s External Blob Store specification for document externalization and show you how you can take advantage of EBS using either freely available code or Blue Thread Technologies’ StoragePoint.
