Large Files in MOSS 2007 – (and a bit about IMM…)
Hi,
There are two questions I constantly hear when talking about using MOSS as a DMS (Document Management System):
- What is the recommended size for uploading files in doc libraries?
- Is there any best practice around storing video and CAD files (150MB +)?
Well, time to sort this one out. Let's start with the facts today: MOSS 2007 has uses 50MB as the default upload file size to a Doc library. Of course, you may change this (up to the max 2GB) but bear in mind that performance could become an issue. The best solution to work around this issue is to keep these files in a network share and use the Link content type to describe their metadata and other MOSS info. You should also add that File Share as a new source to crawl for Search purpose.
For Video/Audio files, keep in mind that the MOSS platform is a great solution for collaborating on digital media. However, the minute you start getting into streaming - you want to think about your architecture. SharePoint streams digital media to thousands of users concurrently – probably not the best way if you know your way around streaming. In either case, you should think about how to break up your Content DBs for performance and back-up/restore purposes. No matter how you do it, storing digital media in SQL will cause your content databases to become very large that can result in long back-up times if you don't split your solution into multiple DBS.
But as always – the future is much brighter. And this time – we're even talking about the near future (no Office 14 here). It's called IMM - Interactive Media Manager. IMM is a solution built for MOSS and is considered to be much more suitable for dealing with digital media. The key for understanding IMM is to understand what IMM does outside of MOSS:
- File storage (IMM track path locations for files stored on SAN)
- Metadata - IMM houses all metadata on a separate SQL server with different offering - the IMM RDF Repository, acting as the translation layer between MOSS and SQL.
More information can be found here and the IMM SDK can be found here: http://www.codeplex.com/imm.
Well – that's it. The next time this question will pop – just link them to here J
Bye,
Adir Ron.