As SharePoint nears $1 billion in revenue, third-party software vendors are joining the party with tools and add-ons.SharePoint has quickly dominated the enterprise landscape. As it grows, IT may be in the market for third-party tools to help keep SharePoint under control.

One such company is Idera. Today it announced Pointbackup. The new software automates SharePoint backups and offers self-service recovery for end users. The company also announced a free software tool, Pointcheck, that monitors SharePoint uptime.

Pointbackup automates backup of SharePoint to the storage system of your choice. It includes a central management console to schedule backups for multiple SharePoint sites. It includes a view of all backup and recovery operations, including how much storage is being used. The console also provides historical data on all activities.

Administrators can restore individual files or entire sites. A built-in search engine facilitates an administrator's ability to find the right files to restore.

The self-service recovery lets individual users search for and restore individual documents so they don't have to pester administrators. The self-service feature relies on a SharePoint Web part that presents a button to users that says "Recover my documents."

Pointbackup starts at $1,795 per server.

The free monitoring tool keeps an eye on basic necessities for servers in the SharePoint stack, including available CPU, memory usage, connection counts, and response times.

I also blogged recently on products from Autonomy, Open Text, and EMC that bring content management capabilities and storage to SharePoint environments.