How to Conquer SharePoint Site Provisioning (Case Study)

Post Date: 06/12/2020
feature image

Case Study – Thermo Fisher Scientific

The Challenge

Office 365 underpins Thermo Fisher’s modern workplace. The biotech company now leverages OneDrive for Business and was undergoing the Microsoft Teams shift from classic to modern SharePoint.

During this move, IT manager Deepa Ravindran and her team took the opportunity to take a step back and analyze their needs. They immediately realized they had three challenges:

  1. Their relatively small IT team was burdened by SharePoint site provisioning tickets
  2. They had almost 12 thousand SharePoint sites that lacked any governance or lifecycle management; and
  3. They did not have a solution to restore a site collection for a full year retention period.
sharepoint site
Initially, they tried to leverage a fully custom third-party solution, but “It was not user friendly,” said Ravindran.

The AvePoint Solution

Thermo Fisher evaluated multiple solutions to address their challenges.

“…But we found AvePoint provides a far better solution and easy usability for us that just directly satisfied our need,” said Ravindran.“ AvePoint’s Governance solution had better touch-free lifecycle management and it complemented AvePoint’s backup solution.”

Cloud Governance’s self-service questionnaire and catalog of Office 365 services have helped Thermo Fisher’s users collaborate more effectively.

“Some people won’t really know what they want so instead of coming to [IT] right away, now it’s all taken care of through that questionnaire tree and self service portal,” said Ravindran. “The questionnaires provide an easy walk-through for the team to identify ‘ok what do I need.’“

Once the SharePoint site, Team, or other Office 365 workspace is provisioned, Thermo Fisher’s governance and lifecycle policies are automatically applied to the corresponding Office 365 Group.

“After the automatic provisioning, the other thing is the lifecycle management and anything we do is intact with recertification,” said Ravindran. “That’s a direct benefit…and it’s a night and day difference.”

Unlocking Agility Enhancing SaaS Management

The Bottom Line

Thermo Fisher’s IT tickets plummeted after deploying Cloud Governance, making their IT team more efficient.

“Recently with our metrics our support tickets have gone down 50 percent, and none of our current tickets are for provisioning a site [so a big burden on our IT team] is gone,” said Ravindran.

Overall, Thermo Fisher is pleased with their implementation of Cloud Backup and Cloud Governance.

“You guys are awesome and always go above and beyond,” said Ravindran. “You go the extra step to make sure it’s all completed and 100 percent fool-proof so we are ready for production.”

Thermo Fisher is now resting assured that they’re able to sustain and foster more adoption across their environment.

Thermo Fisher

Thermo Fisher Scientific is a multi-billion dollar American biotechnology product development company located in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Created in 2006 by the merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific, they employ more than 75,000 people. Their mission is to enable its customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer.

Read the full case study here.


Want more AvePoint success stories? Subscribe to our blog.

Michael is AvePoint's former director of content and communications.

View all posts by Michael S.
Share this blog

Subscribe to our blog