DocAve 5 needs more and better QA

We are using DocAve 4 to backup WSS 2 environment for about a year. It's not perfect and the interface sometimes corky, according to one of my team member, but it does the backup and restore jobs well.

We migrated from WSS 2 to MOSS 2007 early last month and star using DocAve 5 as our main disaster and recovery solutions and to our surprise, there are bugs or features do not look hard to identify and fix. Especially DocAve 5 has been out there for more than a year.

For example, in the Content Manager screen when you want to move site or site collections from one URL to another, pretty much like using STSADM Export and Import commands. In the tree view, there is a green icon next to the designated site and you can change it to point up, down or level. What is this for? We did not find any explanation in the user guide. When we had conference with AvePoint, there own people does not have good idea how and when to use it.

When we tried to move site collection during the conference call with their support, the end results looked pretty bad and they admitted they had to go back to do more testing.

Another example is also related to move site to new URL. If use DocAve's feature, any inactive user accounts do not import to the new site with the contents and they name changed to System Account. This looks like the using STSADM to do exporting and importing without using the -includeusersecurity parameter. However, I can choose to include user security or not but can not find any place in DocAve to choose it.

AvePoint's response was this is by design and it's not a bug. But they will consider to add a check box or something to provide different options.

If you use DocAve before, you know in the job status screen, the bar to show the progress may stop at certain percentage for while, then moves very fast to another number and stops again. In this version, it still acts like this and we can see it stops at 99% for a long time. So the progress bar does not give the users the real progress since from 99% to finish takes longer than moving from 5% to 71%. Then why not making it more realistic to the real progress? Especially this is pretty much the same behavior from the previous version.

The user guide is huge with lots of do this, click here type of instruction. However, for a user does not use DocAve before, it does not tell me why and when to use a feature or a particular option. List all commands and features do not give users a good idea of what they should do with different environments and circumstances.

I think the biggest surprise we had is: DocAve can not performance incremental or differential backup well. When we tested it in a development environment with migrated data, the daily differential backup process generated backed up file size around 40 to 50% of a full backup. However, it was a development and only 5 people to use it and not much changes daily. After couple long talks, AvePoint gave us a hot fix to deal with this problem. They said that because we had migrated sites and some of the URLs did not match the new server farm's URL and DocAve can not handle those contents.

Are we the first and few users with migrated contents and new URLs in MOSS 2007? I don't think so. Then how come this issue never raised any attention?

Anyway, I know DocAve has pretty good reputation to the SharePoint backup and restore solutions. However, this new version also wants to provide migration and administration functions which would be very helpful.. However, we felt that the product needs better and more quality control plus more information to how, why and when to use them.