She said that both products are now in production and are working well. "I've had to do a number of mailbox recoveries, and it's worked like a champ -- some of the easiest recoveries I've ever done," Windsor said.
In fact, she said support for Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration server in DPM 2007 is accelerating the school district's schedule for implementing SharePoint 2007. The district expects that implementation to be completed in two to four months, Windsor said.
"One of the factors driving us to SharePoint 2007 is the fact that DPM is designed to specifically work with [the application] and restore individual site collections," she explained.
The school district provides IT resources to 23 separate facilities, Windsor said. It runs mostly Microsoft Windows Server 2003-based software, including Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server technology.
Windsor said that prior to installing DPM, the school district ran CommVault's Qinetix software and Symantec's Veritas Backup Exec, each of which was managed by a different administrator.
The district turned to DPM to cut costs, help consolidate backup products and simplify disaster recovery, she said. The CommVault product was quite expensive and "never worked gracefully" with SharePoint, Windsor said. "It was something that required a lot of care and feeding." She also noted that Symantec's Backup Exec lacked the compression capabilities the district needed.
Since DPM was installed, the district has decreased the amount of file backup traffic across its WAN and shrunk backup times from 24 hours to just over three hours.
"We happen to be a Microsoft environment, so in my case, DPM works extremely well," said Windsor. "If I had an Oracle server or something, I have no idea how that would work."