DocAve’s mapping functionality is priceless and is exactly what we needed from a migration tool.
Microsoft SharePoint is the core communication platform for CEOCG, both internally and externally. More than 2,000 staff members can access organisational information and documents on the company’s corporate intranet hosted on SharePoint as well as utilise the platform’s features for collaboration. The organisation’s website was also created with SharePoint and often receives as many as 6,000 unique visitors per month.
Both the intranet and website environments were housed on a single server at CEOCG. With approximately 80 gigabytes (GB) of data on the intranet environment and approximately 20 GB of data on the website, the organisation began to experience performance issues. This was especially problematic when it came to the organisation’s website, as it needed to be updated frequently and this was not easy to do because of the system’s slow performance.
In order to resolve the situation, CEOCG reached out to Extelligent Design, an AvePoint partner and SharePoint consultancy in Canberra. The company was chosen due to the success of an extranet project completed for a large college in Canberra. Extelligent Design Solutions Architect and SharePoint MVP Ishai Sagi and his team developed a plan to implement a virtualised server environment with two web front end servers and a separate server for search for the intranet environment, as well as a separate web front end server for the website.
At the same time, it was decided to upgrade the CEOCG’s environment from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. “SharePoint 2010 was a much more mature platform, and offered many more capabilities for websites,” Ishai said. “By upgrading CEOCG’s server environment and SharePoint platform, we could deploy a proper environment that would scale according to the organisation’s needs.”
In order to simplify the migration for both intranet and internet environments, Extelligent Design needed to utilise a SharePoint migration tool in addition to its own solutions.
In order to carry out the migration, Extelligent Design implemented DocAve Migrator from AvePoint. DocAve perform full fidelity content migration from previous versions of SharePoint at the site, subsite, or item level. “We took advantage of two opposing features that DocAve offers,” Ishai said. “For the website, we needed to migrate the environment as is, while we wanted to make changes to the intranet environment in the process of the migration.”
With DocAve, Extelligent Design was able to ensure all data critical to CEOCG website was kept intact during the transfer. All folder structures, document properties, and associated metadata – as well as permissions and access control – were retained with full fidelity. “The process of migrating the internet environment took less than an hour,” Ishai said. “DocAve was extremely fast and the migration process for this portion of the project would have taken at least three weeks longer without it.”
The intranet migration was more complex, as Extelligent Design wanted to help CEOCG take advantage of managed metadata immediately in SharePoint 2010, a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that can be defined and used as attributes for items. DocAve helped automatically move the content from source SharePoint instances to their mapped elements in SharePoint 2010. “DocAve allowed us to map the value of the Choice and LookUp fields in the organisation’s MOSS 2007 environment to managed metadata fields in SharePoint 2010,” Ishai said. “DocAve’s mapping functionality is priceless and is exactly what we needed from a migration tool.”
If Ishai had any questions about DocAve, he utilised AvePoint’s live, 24/7 technical support. “AvePoint having a technical support staff in Australia made a huge difference,” Ishai said. “They responded quickly with answers to my questions.”
In total, Extelligent Design was able to complete the project for CEOCG within four weeks. With SharePoint’s improved performance, CEOCG can now utilize the platform for its electronic forms and other features that could not be taken advantage of before due to the system’s slowness. DocAve was able to help Extelligent Design simplify and speed up the upgrade process, and Ishai wrote an article about his experience with the product. “In total, DocAve saved us approximately six weeks in our efforts to migrate both CEOCG’s intranet and website environments,” Ishai said.
The Catholic Education Office of the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn (CEOCG) oversees 56 Catholic schools throughout New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory.
DocAve’s mapping functionality is priceless and is exactly what we needed from a migration tool.