Cricket Tasmania Achieves $3,000 Annual Savings & Performs Management Tasks 10 Times Faster in Microsoft® Office 365 with AvePoint Online Services
Success Highlights
Customer Location Tasmania, Australia
Industry Sports
Platform SharePoint Online
Cricket Tasmania is the governing body of cricket in Tasmania and promotes and develops the game throughout the state.
Critical Needs
- Enterprise-level backup and quick recovery of lost or corrupted documents in Office 365
- Simplified management of security settings and permissions throughout the Office 365 environment
The Challenge
In order to allow its 60 employees to collaborate over its company intranet, Cricket Tasmania previously used IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. As years passed, the program became less widely used and the company had trouble finding developers on the platform in its region. The company’s ICT department also found training users on Lotus Notes to be a hindrance. “Our staff was more familiar with the feel of Microsoft Office products, so training was time consuming and tricky,” said Luke Meers, ICT Team Leader at Cricket Tasmania.
Cricket Tasmania chose to implement Microsoft Office 365 and began to host its intranet, calendars, workflows, news boards, and other company resources through SharePoint Online. “In addition to providing cloud-based versions of Microsoft Office products with which users were already familiar, Office 365 offered the added bonuses of SharePoint Online and Lync Online, which help our teams collaborate,” Meers said.
In both SharePoint Online and Exchange Online, content can only be restored within 14 days of its deletion. In order to minimise business disruption and support users, Cricket Tasmania’s ICT department decided this was insufficient. The company also planned to retire its onsite tape backup solution in order to reduce overhead required to maintain the system. “In addition to being able to retrieve content for users that was older than 14 days, we knew we could save approximately $3,000 per year by retiring our tape storage system,” Meers said. “We wanted a system for backing up our content in the cloud.”
ICT Team Leader, Cricket Tasmania
The AvePoint Solution
After meeting with AvePoint at a local tradeshow, Cricket Tasmania administrators found the solution they were looking for in AvePoint Online Services. Hosted on Microsoft Azure, AvePoint Online Services (AOS) is a Software-as-a-Service platform that empowers administrators to manage, protect, restructure, synchronise, and report on its Office 365 environment. “We knew that AvePoint Online Services would be a good technical fit for our requirements and could do what we wanted to do,” Meers said.
AOS allows Cricket Tasmania to quickly restore Office 365 content in the environment with its granular backup and recovery functionalities. If a user loses or accidentally deletes a critical business document, Cricket Tasmania is able to recover the document for the user, even if the data was deleted more than 14 days ago. With the data protection features of AOS, the organisation was able to provide a more effective service to users. “AvePoint Online Services gives our users confidence that the ICT department can get important business content back to them within the business day if they make a mistake,” Meers said. “From the administrative perspective, it gives us peace of mind that we have a good backup system in place.”
Cricket Tasmania is also able to utilise AOS to manage its environment by simplifying implementation, management, and enforcement of governance policies of SharePoint Online content, configurations, and security. Administrators could easily browse and identify SharePoint assets using tree or search modes, and take action to propagate configuration and security changes to site collections, sites, folder, and lists in bulk. This offered significant time savings over SharePoint Online’s native capabilities. “AvePoint Online Services is flexible and easy to use when setting up access permissions for our users,” Meers said. “I am able to carry out administrative tasks approximately ten times faster than SharePoint Online’s native capabilities would allow.”
Leading up to its purchase of AOS and throughout its implementation, Cricket Tasmania worked closely with AvePoint’s account management and technical support teams. “We had good conversations with AvePoint’s account management team and they helped us understand how AvePoint Online Services' capabilities can be leveraged to achieve our business requirements,” Meers said. “The technical support team has always responded to us quickly and regularly points us toward resources that not only resolve the issue at hand, but also expand our knowledge on AvePoint Online Services overall.”
The Road Ahead
Cricket Tasmania continues to enable collaboration throughout its organisation with Office 365, and in the future plans to build a CRM system to store customer data in SharePoint Online. AOS provides the organisation with the important data protection and administration abilities it requires as Office 365 continues to evolve into a business-critical system. “AvePoint Online Services gives us peace of mind that we can protect our Office 365 environment according to our organisation’s specific needs,” Meers said. “That is important to us as we develop and expand our system.”