OceanaGold Replicates Data between Microsoft® SharePoint® Environments in New Zealand and the Philippines every 15 Minutes with DocAve®
Success Highlights
Customer Location New Zealand
Industry Mining
Platform SharePoint 2010
Critical Needs
- Two-way replication of data between geographically dispersed SharePoint environments
- Replications that occur without failure despite slow connections
The Challenge
OceanaGold, a mining company based in New Zealand, implemented SharePoint for its corporate intranet as well as to help store and control its documents. Enterprise features such as SharePoint’s search abilities allowed the company’s knowledge workers to find documents easier than other systems would allow. In total, the company currently has 300 SharePoint end-users and 3,000 documents stored in its environment.
OceanaGold also used Nintex workflows to help with document routing and approval for its expenditure system, as its managers travel frequently between the company’s mines in New Zealand and the Philippines. The workflows allowed OceanaGold to automate its expenditure system, which was more convenient and simpler for its employees.
Since the company’s mine in the Philippines is a core part of its business, OceanaGold chose to implement SharePoint to benefit its employees located in that region. “We set up a completely separate SharePoint environment in the Philippines, but we did not want to manage two separate sets of the platform,” said Jeff Nam, IT Manager at OceanaGold. “We wanted to have a single system that was common to employees in both New Zealand and the Philippines, which would require us to replicate data both ways from each environment so employees were working with the same data through SharePoint.”
Since SharePoint did not offer a native replication solution to solve OceanaGold’s challenge, the company’s administrators began a search for a third-party software solution.
IT Manager, OceanaGold
The AvePoint Solution
Upon the recommendation of several trusted service providers, OceanaGold decided to implement AvePoint’s DocAve Replicator – part of the DocAve Software Platform, which is the enterprise-class management platform for SharePoint governance. DocAve Replicator ensures optimal SharePoint performance and content availability by replicating content, configurations, and security settings throughout globally distributed farms.
With DocAve’s highly intuitive user interface, featuring wizards for step-by-step guidance and familiar ribbon-based controls, the OceanaGold’s IT administrators began to set up a replication plan for the company’s data. Using DocAve’s flexible scheduling feature, the administrators set up replications from both the New Zealand and Philippines environments to occur every 15 minutes to ensure that employees in both locations were continually accessing the same data throughout their workday. Even though there was approximately 300-500 milliseconds of latency coming from its environment in the Philippines, DocAve’s ability to manage SharePoint replication even over slow connections enabled replications to occur without failure. “I was surprised by how simple and easy DocAve made replication between our SharePoint environments,” Nam said. “Once we set it up and started it, it just started replicating for us.”
Since DocAve Replicator allowed OceanaGold to effectively synchronise its two separate SharePoint environments as one, there was no need for extra administrative support once its environment in the Philippines was set up and replications began taking place. “Since we can control both SharePoint environments from one central location, we do not require another administrator or team of administrators who understand SharePoint in both New Zealand and the Philippines,” Nam explained. “This brings about a significant cost savings for us.”
The Road Ahead
Since SharePoint was a critical platform in providing policies and procedures to its employees, OceanaGold needed to ensure the same data was centralised for everyone, no matter where they were located. With business locations in both New Zealand and the Philippines, this was a challenge. Thanks to DocAve Replicator, OceanaGold was able to replicate content, configurations, and security settings across its geographically distributed SharePoint environments. “Our information strategy involves having a common system across the whole company,” Nam said. “We were really hoping that DocAve would deliver a solution to enable that, and it did so in a way that is completely seamless for our end users.”