How do you explain SharePoint to a child? I thought of a river of information that flows around and through a building—sort of a San Antonio River Walk kind of environment, only faster flowing. At any point, someone is dipping from the SharePoint river or throwing something in—it’s never the same, just as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus is said to have pointed out about a real river.

Which brings me to a typical SharePoint problem: improving SharePoint information flow, especially across multiple sites. Simply, how do you move digital content in a secure way? Or more complicatedly, how do you deploy and replicate SharePoint elements and content across multi-stage, distributed SharePoint sites? How do you make the river (and maybe all of its tributaries) be all the same river?

To that end, I spoke recently to RepliWeb’s Brad Helicher and Garrick Herrmann about RepliWeb Operational Synchronization for SharePoint (ROSS). ROSS lets SharePoint admins automate SharePoint deployments of complete sites or granular elements, and enables the use of scheduling, reporting, rollback, and recovery in the SharePoint deployment process. With features designed to let admins manage, control, and audit SharePoint deployments, as well as delegate deployment tasks to developers, it appears to be one way to manage the river and ensure it’s the same river all of your organization is swimming in.

“Two years ago customers started saying they were making huge investments in SharePoint,” says Brad Helicher. “We took our expertise in the file transfer space and introduced a product to ensure the secure delivery of SharePoint files.”

Large enterprises are moving to SharePoint as a platform to build and manage things on, Helicher says, and organizations with complex SharePoint sites need a layer of automation to keep production up to speed—“they have a lack of governance, a lack of control, the inability to move assets,” and, he adds, the native tools that would help them are unreliable.

“Companies want rules-based processes, they want to accelerate release cycles, they want to control deployment practices and rights.” The burden, he says, is on SharePoint teams to produce, in spite of being in charge of so many tasks. ROSS’s ability to automate SharePoint deployments can accelerate production, he says. To learn more, see RepliWeb’s website.