With imason’s service and AvePoint solutions, we were able to meet our SharePoint migration goals.
With a staff of approximately 3,500 and offices spread worldwide, Husky implemented Microsoft SharePoint to house its corporate intranet. Nearly all of the company’s staff began to access the information stored within the intranet site, including employees working off-site with laptops. In addition to leveraging the platform as a way to store and share important, up-todate company information, Husky also used the platform to empower its employees with the means to collaborate more effectively. Team sites were created for all departments throughout the company, and employees were able to use SharePoint’s renowned collaboration functionality to track dayto-day team activities, and manage important ongoing projects.
As SharePoint adoption grew throughout the organization, Husky set up separate SharePoint farms for each of its global offices. The company’s intranet was accessed through a farm located in the headquarters in Bolton, Ontario, but team sites for each region were accessed through farms housed in their corresponding offices. To complicate matters further, each farm utilized different, and sometimes multiple, versions of SharePoint. The Bolton farm had instances of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003, Windows SharePoint Server (WSS) 2003, and SPS 2001, the farm in Milton, Vermont used WSS 2003, the farm in Luxembourg used WSS 2003, and the farm in Shanghai, China used both WSS 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.
When Microsoft SharePoint 2010 was released, Husky administrators decided it was time to upgrade all of the company’s SharePoint environments to the new platform for its enhanced features, in addition to solving performance issues the company was encountering within certain environments. “We were overdue for an upgrade, and the release of SharePoint 2010 provided an ideal opportunity to get all of our environments on the latest version of the platform,” said Mike Kozai, IT Manager for Husky. “Our plan is to ultimately have all employees access the farm in Bolton, which will utilize Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint to make Husky’s SharePoint content even more accessible and easier to search for end-users.”
Husky administrators turned to consulting firm imason to carry out the migration project. imason focuses on working with the right technology tools and solutions to build innovative and compelling applications for Canada’s largest companies. “We’ve worked successfully with imason since 2002,” Kozai said. “They are our go-to company for SharePoint initiatives.”
Due to the multitude of environments across Husky’s farms, imason knew that a migration would not be possible with native tools alone, especially since those tools will not enable migration directly to SharePoint 2010 from platform releases prior to MOSS 2007. “In order to migrate from multiple legacy platforms at once and upgrade Husky’s environment with a minimal impact to its day-to-day business, we needed to find a third-party software solution to help us carry out the project efficiently and successfully,” said Cosmin Ovesia, Senior Consultant at imason.
As project lead, Ovesia investigated several different solutions and ultimately selected AvePoint’s DocAve Migrator. With DocAve, administrators can perform full-fidelity content migration at the item, subsite, or site level. DocAve’s efficient and reliable data transfer is unique in its ability to migrate content while retaining all of the associated metadata, maximizing organizations’ return on existing investments. “DocAve was the only tool we found on the market that could migrate from all versions of SharePoint,” said Ovesia. “Unlike other tools, it also worked well with Husky’s network and was easy to use.”
In order to properly plan the migration, Husky and imason first sent surveys to all of the company’s site owners, from which they gathered specific information about sites and determined how to architect the new environment. They could also learn which sites were no longer utilized by end-users and therefore could be deleted. “One of the advantages of DocAve is that it is very granular,” Kozai said. “We could pick exactly which sites we wanted to migrate and determine where we wanted to place them in the new environment. Since our deployment consisted of team sites spread across multiple environments, migrating allowed us the perfect opportunity to bring all corresponding sites – such as those utilized by our global IT department – into better-organized, consolidated site collections.”
Once the planning phase was complete, imason began the migration. DocAve’s flexible job scheduling abilities allowed the administrators to carry out jobs according to Husky’s specific business needs, reducing the impact on the functioning production environment. “We were able to perform smaller migrations during business hours by redirecting end-users to their old environment or making certain sites ‘read-only’ while the upgrade took place,” Ovesia said. “But, thanks to DocAve, large site collections, such as one with more than 200 GB of data, could be migrated outside of business hours and ensure end-user access to the platform was not significantly affected.”
Whenever the need arose, imason worked closely with AvePoint’s live, global technical support team to solve any challenges encountered throughout the migration process. “AvePoint’s technical support team was great and very responsive,” Ovesia said. “Any issues we experienced were met with an effective solution within a couple of days, unlike other software companies I deal with that often take months.”
Throughout the process, imason migrated an average of 50 sites per day and approximately 200 GB of data per month. Husky’s migration was completed in slightly less than four months, which coincided perfectly with the overall migration plan. “In all, imason migrated approximately 800 GB of data and 2,400 sites with DocAve,” Kozai said. “Thanks to our pre-migration planning with imason and DocAve’s granular capabilities, we were able to consolidate approximately 350 site collections across our company’s entire deployment into a much more manageable 60 site collections.”
Now that Husky’s migration plan has been successfully completed, all end-users throughout the entire global organization have access to SharePoint 2010. Performance issues that affected the company’s previous environment have ceased, and employees are beginning to learn and master the platform’s new features.
In the near future, most of Husky’s global farms will be retired and all end-users will access the main farm in Bolton, which consists of two web front end servers, two job/index servers, one FAST server for search, and a back-end SQL server farm. “With imason’s service and AvePoint solutions, we were able to meet our migration goals and accomplish the first major step in our plan to upgrade our entire SharePoint environment to one centralized farm on SharePoint 2010,” Kozai said.
Husky Injection Molding Systems is a leading global supplier of injection molding equipment and services to the plastics industry. The company has more than 40 service and sales offices, supporting customers in over 100 countries. Husky's manufacturing facilities are located in Canada, the United States, Luxembourg, Austria, and China.
With imason’s service and AvePoint solutions, we were able to meet our SharePoint migration goals.