ELIN Motoren GmbH Swiftly Migrates to Microsoft SharePoint and Integrates File Shares with AvePoint
Success Highlights
Customer Location Austria
Industry Industrial
Platform SharePoint 2013
Critical Needs
- Governed access to file share content without migrating
- Easily move content from development to production environment
- Centralized SharePoint administration
The Challenge
As ELIN Motoren’s 325-person user base increasingly adopted SharePoint, IT decided to upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. The organization housed terabytes of data in SharePoint but also had critical data living in file systems, which affected the organization’s upgrade approach. IT wanted to migrate all of its legacy SharePoint content (including workflows) to its new environment, but leave critical content in file shares. This presented a few challenges to the organization’s IT team.
To avoid losing any legacy data, processes, or workflows, IT sought a third-party solution that would help the team swiftly migrate SharePoint content and enable file share presentation via SharePoint. “We also wanted the ability to quickly and easily reorganize content within our SharePoint environment,” said Lukas Rasch, System Administrator at ELIN Motoren. “Being able to move content from development to production would significantly shorten the cycles of our development projects.”
In addition to migration, the IT team also needed a way to centrally manage permissions. Natively, SharePoint permissions management can be a very time-consuming and manual process. “As administrators, it’s important for us to make sure the right people have access in SharePoint,” Rasch said. “Out of the box, we can’t apply permissions in bulk. We have to go to each individual site where we want them to have access.
System Administrator, ELIN Motoren GmbH
The AvePoint Solution
After evaluating multiple third-party solutions to meet its SharePoint migration requirements, ELIN Motoren GmbH decided to implement DocAve Software, AvePoint’s fully integrated platform for SharePoint migration, management, and protection. Not only did DocAve fulfill the organization’s migration needs, it also filled in gaps in native SharePoint administration.
DocAve allowed the organization’s administrators to quickly migrate all of its legacy SharePoint content to the new environment in a matter of hours. With DocAve, IT selectively migrated critical legacy content – including metadata, workflows, and workflow histories – to SharePoint 2013 with full fidelity. “Being able to migrate everything including workflows was really critical to the success of our migration,” Rasch said. “We were confident that we migrated all of our data over and did not lose any content.”
Using DocAve, the organization was also able to reorganize and move content within SharePoint. As with migration, IT has the ability to move content with full fidelity. Specifically, IT benefitted from migrating content from development to production more quickly. “Previously, SharePoint content management was problematic for us,” Rasch said. “With DocAve, it is very easy to do. The ability to migrate metadata along with content is a key requirement for us whenever we make changes in SharePoint. We could not have done this without DocAve.”
As a fully integrated platform, DocAve allows IT administrators to manage multiple aspects of SharePoint from a single location. Along with migration and content management, the organization uses DocAve to manage SharePoint permissions. Natively, it can be tedious to designate permissions to a new employee in SharePoint. With DocAve, admins can manage all user permissions and apply bulk changes from a central interface. “It is extremely valuable to have central permissions management for all of SharePoint,” Rasch said. “It takes us much less time to designate permissions for our users than we previously could out of the box. And the fact that we can do this with the same solution for content management makes it all the more convenient.”
While IT was able to quickly and efficiently migrate legacy content in SharePoint 2010, the team very much wanted to avoid migrating content living in file systems. This is where File Share Navigator came in, enabling IT to present file share content via SharePoint without actually migrating it. “Integrating our file share content saved us a lot of time and effort,” Rasch said. “Now, users can access everything they need in just one place: SharePoint. That has really helped us with adoption.”
The Road Ahead
With DocAve, the organization successfully upgraded to SharePoint 2013 – selectively migrating legacy content with full fidelity to ensure only necessary data was moved to the new environment. Beyond migration and file share integration, DocAve also provided IT with additional SharePoint administration capabilities such as easy reorganization of content within SharePoint and centralized administration to manage user permissions. “With DocAve, we were able to optimize and centralize administration and data transfers within our SharePoint environments,” Rasch said. “It’s great to get all of that functionality in one solution – in this respect, DocAve has really simplified things for us.”
The company also implemented DocAve File Share Navigator – integrating legacy file share content instead of migrating. “We wanted to avoid migrating data in our file systems,” Rasch said. “With DocAve File Share Navigator, we definitely accomplished this. Integrating our file systems with SharePoint lets our users access that data without IT having to move it to a new location.”