Replicator 7.4 - Product and Concepts Guide

About the Product and Concepts Guide

The Metalogix Replicator Product and Concepts Guide provides you with product-related information such as details about each edition of the product, a reference architecture, and various concepts.

Organization of this Guide

The Product and Concepts Guide includes the following information:

1.About the Product and Concepts Guide

2.Key Features

3.Concepts

4.Metalogix Replicator Editions and Features

5.Metalogix Replicator Reference Architecture

Metalogix Replicator Documentation

Metalogix Replicator documentation ships with the Metalogix Replicator distribution. It is also available at the Metalogix Product Resource Center, http://documents.quest.com/Metalogix-Replicator

The Metalogix Replicator documentation set consists of the following guides:

Product and Concepts Guide

The Product and Concepts Guide provides a high-level overview of Metalogix Replicator and describes new features introduced in this release.

Quick Start Guide

The Quick Start Guide guides you through a basic installation and configuration of Replicator. After completing this guide you will have a working Replicator Network where changes made on one web application are automatically replicated to the other. You will be able to move onto the Evaluation Guide to perform various Metalogix Replicator scenario tests on your environment.

Installation Guide

The Installation Guide guides you through installation, uninstall, and upgrading of Metalogix Replicator in various SharePoint farm configurations.

Evaluation Guide

The Evaluation Guide guides you through various Metalogix Replicator scenarios, provided for the purpose of reviewing Replicator within your own SharePoint environment. Prospective Clients are encouraged to use this guide to test Replicator.

Reference Guide

The Reference Guide describes the operations and user interface available to replication administrators through the SharePoint Central Administration and Site Administration pages.

Command-line Reference

The Command-line Reference describes the PowerShell commands you can use to configure and maintain your Replication Network.

Scenario Guides

Scenario Guides describe specific product features and how to implement and configure them for your SharePoint environment.

Metalogix Replicator Overview

Replicator allows SharePoint lists and events to be replicated to one or more SharePoint servers. This is a convenient and efficient means of making sure data is always available.

Examples of items that can be replicated are document, picture and slide libraries, announcements, links, contacts tasks, issues, custom lists, surveys, Wiki page libraries, project tasks, discussion boards and permissions. Replicator also replicates many SharePoint events, including the addition or modification of web sites and site collections, templates, users and groups.

Live network bandwidth is often at a premium, and networks compensate for this by creating local copies of information on remote web applications. Managing content in this manner allows users local access to regularly updated copies of documents without taxing available bandwidth or network resources. Many replication applications allow users to view read-only copies of documents, without permitting updates from remote sites. When they do permit this, the process requires complex caching servers to be established and maintained. With Replicator, when a file is created on one server and a user is modifying it on another, the servers do not have to communicate with each other every time the documents are locally accessed.

Replicator provides efficient, easy, multi-directional replication. SharePoint lists can be replicated to many systems, and any modifications to documents are automatically updated throughout the whole system. In effect, instead of having isolated Target Web Applications, the entire SharePoint network is interconnected and constantly updated, so that it functions as a single unit, but does not require extra bandwidth or network resources.

Replicator is very easy to access, because it installs itself as a set of solutions within SharePoint itself and is fully integrated. Because it is resident within SharePoint, the entire user interface is directly incorporated into SharePoint's Central Administration site.

Replicator Packages are transferred using the Microsoft Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS). Replicator communicates solely using the HTTP or HTTPS protocols. Replicator can also be set to run in offline mode, which replicates Packages directly to a system drive. In this case, only local disk access is used and it is an administrator's responsibility to transfer these packages to the target web application.