Kern County Sheriff’s Office Reduces Data Stored in Microsoft SharePoint Content Databases by 84% with DocAve
Success Highlights
Customer Location Bakersfield, CA
Industry Public Sector
Platform SharePoint 2010
Critical Needs
- Full SharePoint platform and granular backup capabilities as well as swift restoration of lost or deleted content for end-users
- Automatic movement of binary large object (BLOB) data off of SharePoint’s content database to external storage to optimize storage and improve platform performance
The Challenge
A vital Southern California agency since forming in 1866, the Kern County Sheriff’s Office recently modernized systems and processes across the agency. Where it once relied on Excel spreadsheets, clipboards, and printed documents to record and share information, the agency now utilizes Microsoft SharePoint. The office’s use of the platform expanded quickly to become a critical system. “SharePoint is essential to our agency – used by everyone from the Sheriff to the clerks in our substations,” said Chris Mulanax, Senior Information Systems Specialist at the office. “In addition to our own office, our environment is also accessed by the County Counsel and District Attorney’s offices – with approximately 2,000 users on the platform in total.”
The agency’s use of SharePoint includes logging inmates and their related activities, managing overtime budgets, as well as tracking financial and crime statistics. The agency is also able to share information with employees through a centralized location, rather than distributing physical materials to all relevant parties as it once did. SharePoint is also important in the training of deputies and civilian employees. “Training employees across 33 locations and 13 substations was a logistical challenge in the past,” Mulanax said. “Now we’re able to put training videos, documentation, and tests in one web-based environment that our trainees can simply log into and access from anywhere.”
With the increased importance of SharePoint to the organization, two factors were certain: The environment needed utmost protection and data stored on the system would grow rapidly. The agency sought a third-party solution to face these challenges. “With SharePoint alone, the process for restoring any lost or deleted documents would be very time-consuming,” Mulanax said. “We also needed a way to store our increasing amounts of data outside of SharePoint’s content database to optimize performance.”
Senior Information Systems Specialist, Kern County Sheriff’s Office
The AvePoint Solution
The office chose to implement DocAve, the enterprise-class infrastructure management platform for SharePoint. DocAve enables centralized or delegated management of SharePoint farms, including solutions for data protection and storage optimization. “We knew SharePoint was going to grow, and AvePoint gave us the tools we needed manage it,” Mulanax said. “We have deployed 86 different applications for our various information systems, but DocAve gives me the convenience of using only one central application to manage our SharePoint environment.”
DocAve Backup and Restore provides the agency with business-aware, comprehensive protection of its SharePoint environment. The tool offers full-fidelity backup and restore of all SharePoint content, including sites, lists, libraries, workflow definitions and instances, configurations, permissions, metadata, and version histories. The office was able to set up a backup plan that met its specific needs and have it run automatically. “Every night, we run a full platform backup followed by a granular backup of our most critical data,” Mulanax said. “Once that’s complete I receive an email notification letting me know it worked. DocAve works consistently and I don’t have to worry about it.”
In one instance, the agency’s technical services site was mistakenly deleted. The office lost documentation on all of its applications, backup schemas, and more. Previously, retrieving this important information would involve working with another team that manages SQL backups and potentially take days to restore. With DocAve, the process was much faster. “DocAve allowed us to restore our deleted site within 30 minutes,” Mulanax said. “It worked 100 percent, and I was able to do it without the help of other teams.”
DocAve Storage Manager helped the agency optimize its system and prepare for future SharePoint growth. DocAve combines multiple real-time and scheduled business rules to externalize BLOB content based on file size, type, or other document properties. With large files such as training videos, evidence photographs, PDFs, and Word documents in the system, the agency ensures anything larger than one megabyte is stored outside of SharePoint’s SQL Server content database and instead on more cost-effective, scalable virtualized servers. “DocAve automatically moved 84 percent of our SharePoint data off of our SQL Server storage – helping ensure we were within Microsoft’s recommended limits for content databases,” Mulanax said.
Not only were end-users able to access and interact with the externalized content just as before, but the optimization of SharePoint’s content database allowed them to do it even faster. “After implementing DocAve, we saw immediate performance improvement within 24 hours,” Mulanax said. “Videos, photos, and other documents now open much faster, allowing our teams to be more productive on a daily basis.”
The Road Ahead
With DocAve, the agency was able to ensure its growing SharePoint environment was protected and optimized, all through one convenient solution. “We wear many hats at our organization, and SharePoint is not my only responsibility,” Mulanax said. “With DocAve backing up our SharePoint data at all times and offloading our storage automatically, I can focus my efforts on other important matters at the agency.”
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