AVEPOINT-LÖSUNGEN
To conduct its migration, the City of Greenville engaged AvePoint Client Services (ACS). Through its Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS) offering, the ACS team supported the city’s IT team throughout the entire project – from discovery and designing a project plan to execution and evaluation. “We looked at other SharePoint migration service providers, but only AvePoint’s technical team fully understood what we needed,” Jones said. “And the fact that AvePoint is a Microsoft Gold Partner was a big selling point for us.”
AvePoint used its fully integrated SharePoint management platform, DocAve Software, to conduct the migration. With DocAve, the city’s IT team was able to migrate three environments – internal production, quality assurance (QA), and an extranet – according to requirements in one month. “With DocAve, it was easy to look at what we wanted to migrate from our old SharePoint,” Jones said. “Our larger requirements were around migrating critical Nintex workflows and web services. DocAve allowed us to look at every site and item in SharePoint 2007 and bring what we wanted with full fidelity. The content migrated very well, and we’re confident that we didn’t lose any data in the migration.”
In addition to DocAve’s migration capabilities, the city’s IT team gained invaluable aid and expertise from AvePoint’s technical team. Although the city wasn’t operating on a tight schedule, AvePoint helped its IT team design a migration project plan around factors like content database size and operational requirements. “AvePoint performed the migration according to plan,” Jones said. “We really appreciated that there were no big surprises or delays.”
Since it had such a positive experience, the city reached back out to AvePoint for another project. “When we had to upgrade our SharePoint service packs, we automatically went back to AvePoint for help,” Jones said. “It wasn’t a very long project, but they were a real help to us.”
Not only was DocAve essential in the city’s migration, it also provides more flexible SharePoint backup and restore capabilities. With DocAve, the IT team has the ability to run different types of backups on a custom schedule. “We run full backups once per week, usually on Saturday mornings,” Jones said. “We also schedule automatic incremental backups every evening. It’s convenient to be able to schedule these outside of working hours.”
Administrators also experience significant time savings when restoring content. Where the previous SQL Server backup approach required a lot more work to retrieve a single item, DocAve allows the city’s IT team to quickly and painlessly restore SharePoint content at a more granular level. “Before, there was the possibility of losing work when doing a restore,” Jones said. “Now, with DocAve, we can recover data down to the level we need. It used to take up to two full days to recover something from SQL backup. Now, it only takes two hours, and we don’t lose any metadata.”