Park Nicollet Protects Vital SharePoint Data and Meets Compliance Objectives with DocAve®
Success Highlights
Customer Location St. Louis Park, MN
Industry Health Services
Platform SharePoint 2010
Critical Needs
- Automated reports on SharePoint usage and content
- Granular backup of important SharePoint content scheduled according to business needs
- Fast, full recovery of lost and corrupted SharePoint components
The Challenge
Providing vital healthcare services in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area and supporting a large staff in multiple locations throughout the city and the suburbs, Park Nicollet required a platform upon which knowledgeworkers could collaborate on documents and access critical information. The company ultimately chose Microsoft SharePoint, and has since developed a robust collaboration solution using the platform containing a wide variety of team and project sites. The solution is built upon Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which runs on a server farm consisting of two web front ends, one application server, and a SQL cluster. For search, Park Nicollet is using Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with a slightly larger farm, including two web front ends, two application servers, and a SQL cluster
Park Nicollet recently began work on one of its largest and most important initiatives to date: upgrading its entire electronic medical records (EMR) system. With several hundred employees working on the project, the company is leveraging SharePoint heavily to allow staff to collaborate as well as manage documents, workflows, and content search.
Since the information and content related to the EMR project was of paramount importance, Park Nicollet’s IT administrators knew the company’s SharePoint environment would require significant protection.
Beyond backup and recovery, another regular responsibility of Park Nicollet administrators was providing reports for audits, which must be carried out on a constant basis to meet objectives such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). In order to meet compliance standards, Park Nicollet administrators needed the ability to produce reports on the company’s SharePoint environment that showed information such as which end-users accessed what data when. Natively, SharePoint did not provide the ability to track this information and had no means to control the specific categories of information that appeared in the reports. Park Nicollet has a team specifically in charge of meeting compliance issues, but since SharePoint’s native compliance-related functionality was difficult to harness, involvement from the company’s SharePoint administrators was required to produce all reports.
With enhanced backup, recovery, and compliance abilities required, Park Nicollet’s SharePoint administrators knew they could not rely upon SharePoint’s native abilities alone. They needed to find a third-party solution to sufficiently meet the industry’s demands and carry out day-to-day business as efficiently as possible.
SharePoint Architect, Park Nicollet
The AvePoint Solution
Park Nicollet began to utilize IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) for Microsoft SharePoint as a backup and recovery solution. Park Nicollet administrators learned that TSM for SharePoint utilizes AvePoint’s DocAve Backup and Restore for SharePoint functionality through an OEM agreement. Highly satisfied with the enterprise-level backup and restore capabilities the program provided, administrators sought more AvePoint tools, including DocAve Auditor for SharePoint to meet compliance needs.
DocAve Auditor empowers administrators to track and record all SharePoint interactions, including usage, search, and security changes. With DocAve, Park Nicollet could pull reports and view data by numerous attributes, such as by Time Viewed and Modified, which enabled the company to audit securities, investigate usage patterns, and monitor sensitive information. After the initial implementation, DocAve Auditor also allowed Park Nicollet’s compliance team to easily furnish their own reports without input from SharePoint administrators. “DocAve gave our compliance team the ability and confidence to run SharePoint reports on their own, which saved significant amounts of time that I could devote to other important projects related to our deployment,” said Scott Glaser, SharePoint Architect at Park Nicollet.
Since all of AvePoint’s solutions run on a unified platform, Park Nicollet also opted to implement DocAve Backup and Restore. DocAve provides full-fidelity backup and recovery, from an individual content item to an entire SharePoint environment and all of its farm-level components, maintaining all metadata, securities, and version histories. DocAve’s convenient scheduler and ability to perform backups on a granular level allowed administrators to run backups on mission-critical content for the EMR upgrade project regularly, ensuring any chance of a system failure was avoided entirely.
DocAve’s ability to granularly restore SharePoint content down to the item level also provided enormous benefits to administrators when required to retrieve items lost, corrupted, or erroneously deleted by end-users. “Before DocAve, we had to restore outof-place and it could take hours to complete,” Glaser said. “Now it only takes minutes.”
Similar to DocAve Auditor and the compliance team, DocAve Backup and Restore also allowed Park Nicollet’s data recovery team to backup and restore SharePoint content themselves once SharePoint administrators implemented the module, enabling administrators to focus on more critical tasks to their business.
The Road Ahead
With DocAve, not only was Park Nicollet’s essential SharePoint data fully protected, it was also carefully monitored to meet the healthcare industry’s stringent compliance objectives. DocAve’s reliability and ease of use allowed SharePoint administrators to put these important responsibilities into the hands of the appropriate teams within the organization. This, in turn, freed valuable time the SharePoint administrators could spend on developing and implementing future plans for the company’s corporate intranet.
Park Nicollet administrators also found great benefits in AvePoint’s global, live support offered through its Premier Maintenance plan. “AvePoint’s support has been top notch from the beginning and is always ready to act whenever we need them,” Glaser said. “Watching them work has also empowered us with the knowledge and experience to address issues on our own.”
As Park Nicollet continues to develop and grow its SharePoint environment, additional DocAve tools will be implemented to meet its evolving needs. “We chose DocAve because of its unified platform, which will enable us to scale our deployment and effectively meet challenges in all areas,” Glaser said.
