Review of Third-Party SharePoint 2003 Backup Recovery Tool

I have had the opportunity to work on many SharePoint 2003 customizations for both Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. The customizations either required custom web part development, user-interface changes, or event handler changes. In different instances, I went through the steps of installing/configuring SharePoint (at a client site) and setting up automatic backup/recovery scripts. Each time there was a problem related to a SharePoint site look and feel (WSS/SPS), document library security, or simply moving from development to staging to production -- I wondered if there was a better way. Needless to say, a company was working on exactly that.

In this entry, I am evaluating AvePoint and their product DocAve 4. Below is what I found...