Because AvePoint Online Services makes it easy to manage Office 365, we can maintain a smaller staff but achieve a lot more.
For Select Core Services, Office 365 – SharePoint Online was the perfect central, scalable workspace for its 150 onsite and remote users. The organization’s core systems are built in SharePoint Online, supporting all teams from operations, to finance, and sales. “We’re able to put everything in one platform,” said Stefanie Cortese, Technology Development Manager at Select Core Services. “For example, we’ve built customer-facing portals for contract management and store sales documentation, which has increased our efficiency.”
As the organization started centralizing data in SharePoint Online and made the conscious decision to put mission critical data in the cloud, the IT team wanted to be able to control backups beyond what Microsoft provided out of the box. “We wanted to have copies of our own backups,” Cortese said. “We once had to get back a payroll file that was already permanently deleted. Microsoft was helpful because it was a high impact document, but it wasn’t easy. We wanted to be able to manage that ourselves.”
In addition to more flexibility around Office 365 backup, the IT staff desired a solution that would provide insight into how users worked in SharePoint Online – which would ultimately help them manage the environment more efficiently. “We wanted to get an idea of what people were working on in SharePoint,” Cortese said. “That information would really help us, on the development side, understand where we needed to devote our time and resources.”
To gain more control over its SharePoint Online environment, Select Core Services selected AvePoint Online Services (AOS), a fully-hosted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for Office 365 management. “As we looked at different options, AOS really had the features we were looking for,” Cortese said. “We also liked that there was no additional cost for premium support.”
As a SaaS offering, AvePoint Online Services was easy for IT to implement. With no need for installation or agents, IT can spend time on other areas of SharePoint management and maintain a smaller team without sacrificing efficiency. “On our team, we have three full-time and one part-time employees,” Cortese said. “We manage all the IT, all the applications, procurement, and now mission critical systems on the portals. Having one platform to manage everything is huge. The whole team is trained on AOS, which makes it easier to onboard new team members and I don’t have to look for software downloads or license keys.”
With AvePoint Online Services, Select Core Services no longer has to rely solely on Microsoft to manage and retrieve backups. AOS allows the organization to back up SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and OneDrive for Business to a variety of storage locations and customize the backup schedules according to business needs. “We segment our data by its business impact and set different backup schedules for each segment,” Cortese said. “For high priority data, we run automatic full backup monthly and incremental backups daily. Lower priority data gets backed up on a quarterly basis. It’s also nice to be able to store backups wherever we want, and we chose Azure.”
The organization’s IT team also has the flexibility to configure different retention policies for data of varying priority levels. The team determines priority levels based on each SharePoint site’s function and have the ability to store more critical data for a longer time period. Beyond SharePoint Online, IT also has the ability to back up other Office 365 services. “When employees leave, we can go in and back up their Exchange and OneDrive for business content without having to physically get their computers,” Cortese said. “That’s a big help.”
Select Core Services does not only benefit from more flexible backup capabilities. AvePoint Online Services also allows IT to perform granular restores. Where previously it could take up to seven days to retrieve an item with Microsoft’s help, IT can now handle these requests internally – and in less than an hour. “The ability to do granular restores with AOS is a huge insurance policy for us,” Cortese said. “We can’t have the business impacted when a critical document gets lost.”
AvePoint Online Services also provides SharePoint Online reporting capabilities beyond what Microsoft offers natively. IT automatically runs lifecycle usage and permission reports to gain insight into its environment. Usage reports informs IT of where to devote more resources. They can also try to make a correlation between sales portal usage and revenue driven. IT also has the ability to automatically generate permission reports to review and duplicate custom permissions. “This report helps us shortcut some functions in IT and save a lot of time,” Cortese said. “When sales hires a new team member, that person needs access to historical data. With AOS, we can go into that list or library and clone existing permissions for the new user. It used to take four hours to do this manually depending how many sites they needed access to, but with AOS it takes 10 minutes.”
With AvePoint Online Services, Select Core Services has more control over its Office 365 environment than ever before. The ability to configure automatic backups according to a custom schedule means IT is only backing up data as needed. It also now has the ability to granularly restore items to SharePoint Online from Azure, preventing the organization from any negative impact due to permanent deletion or corruption of critical content. “Because AvePoint Online Services makes it so easy to manage Office 365, we can maintain a smaller staff but achieve a lot more,” Cortese said.
Select Core Services is a solutions provider with experience in developing custom and semi-custom collaboration and business automation solutions that integrate centralized and cloud technologies.
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Because AvePoint Online Services makes it easy to manage Office 365, we can maintain a smaller staff but achieve a lot more.