Sunshine Coast Council (SCC) is a local government district with 303,000 residents in South East Queensland. It is a diverse region with picturesque hinterland towns, coastal urban centers, waterways, national parks, state forests, bushland, rural areas, and scenic mountains.
The Sunshine Coast Council and its 1,100 users champion sustainability, celebrate a diverse workforce and pride themselves on the quality of the wide range of services they deliver.
SCC wanted to move away from their ageing on-premises SharePoint site to a new cloud-based intranet and collaboration platform. They decided to migrate to Microsoft Office 365 in order to leverage its portfolio of apps and collaboration tools such as SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams.
With the move to Office 365, SCC wanted to quickly boost adoption and leverage the platform with confidence. At the same time, maintaining an orderly content repository and collaboration ecosystem was important to preserve a central source of truth, institutional knowledge and a high-quality search experience.
To accomplish both goals at scale, the SCC needed a solution that allowed its users to self-provision workspaces while still maintaining overall oversight and control and all without overburdening the IT team.
AvePoint’s partner, Sharing Minds, helped the SCC implement Governance Automation to create a managed, automated workspace provisioning, management and expiration process.
Upon implementing Governance Automation, SCC’s environment now had a form-based self-serving website for IT requests.
Users were now provided access to SharePoint services via a request and auto (or manual) approval method.
For example; Council staff could enter the AvePoint portal, request the desired service – such as a new communication site, new team site, change site name, etc. – and have the request approved and provisioned automatically by the AvePoint platform.
The Council also gained the ability to govern its SharePoint and Office 365 environment by tracking usage and giving sites a ‘lease’ period. This ensure that unused sites are expired appropriately helping to prevent compliance issues or spending resources on maintaining obsolete items.
Through Governance Automation, the SCC gained an ease of supporting and governing the platform long-term without the need for significant human resources.
The SCC also leveraged AvePoint’s Content Manger solution to ensure a seamless integration of SharePoint communication sites, Microsoft Teams workspaces, and Project Online records based on site and document metadata and labels.
The Council is now able to rest assured that their content management and adoption of Office 365 is scaling sustainably while simultaneously keeping their environment clear of stale data.
Additionally, the SCC IT team has been able to focus on strategic plans and accelerate their Office 365 roadmap with the time that Governance Automation has saved them from tedious workspace provisioning and lifecycle management tasks.
AvePoint accelerates your digital transformation success. Over 16,000 companies and 9 million SharePoint and Office 365 users worldwide trust AvePoint software and services for their data migration, management, and protection needs in the cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments. A four-time Microsoft Partner of the Year, AvePoint is a Microsoft Global ISV Partner and has been named to the Inc. 500|5000 six times and the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ five times. Founded in 2001, AvePoint is privately held and headquartered in Jersey City, NJ.
