DocAve corresponded perfectly to what we needed for our migration from SharePoint 2010 on premises to SharePoint Online.
As a Microsoft partner and technology company, vNext has made extensive use of SharePoint as its enterprise portal since 2008. In addition to document management, the platform is used to not only facilitate collaboration amongst its 75 employees, but also external users as well. “We use SharePoint to share information and collaborate with approximately 100 clients and partners,” said Pierre Vivier-Merle, Business Productivity Director at vNext.
Previously using an on-premises deployment of SharePoint 2010, vNext ultimately decided to migrate to Office 365 - SharePoint Online after the platform was released. Among other reasons, moving its business data to the cloud would allow the company to reduce infrastructure costs as well as enable better security and uptime in the face on any potential disasters such as theft or fire. “We’re a cloud-oriented company, so migrating to Office 365 made sense to us,” Vivier-Merle said. “Utilizing SharePoint in the cloud would provide access to extensive information sharing for our users as well as better mobile access capabilities than SharePoint 2010.”
Since SharePoint’s native functionality could not migrate the company’s business data with full fidelity, vNext knew it needed a third-party solution to ensure no information was lost in the process. “We needed a simple tool that could help us retain versioning and give us more enhanced capabilities when carrying out our migration,” Vivier-Merle said.
To ensure all essential business data was migrated, vNext chose to utilize DocAve Migrator – part of the DocAve Software Platform, the enterprise-class infrastructure management platform for SharePoint. “DocAve corresponded perfectly to what we needed for our migration from SharePoint 2010 on premises to SharePoint Online,” Vivier-Merle said. “We did not need to evaluate any other options.”
DocAve Migrator enables administrators to perform full-fidelity content migration from previous versions of SharePoint to SharePoint Online at the site, subsite, or item level. DocAve’s efficient and reliable data transfer is unique in its ability to migrate content while retaining all of the associated metadata, letting organizations maximize return on existing investments and gain more value from SharePoint Online. These capabilities allowed vNext to carry out its migration as required while simplifying the overall process. “DocAve helped us perform a high-quality migration that carried over our metadata and retained versioning for all of our business content,” Vivier-Merle said. “The tool is easy to use, and we appreciated its distributed tree view, which gave us an overview of the content we were migrating and allowed us to drill down into specific content when necessary.”
Because of its ease of use and ability to allow administrators to configure migration jobs from a single web-based user interface, the administrators were able to schedule migration jobs and monitor their progress throughout the process. Ultimately, vNext migrated 200 gigabytes (GB) of SharePoint data across 400 site collections directly to SharePoint Online with only 10 days of work. “If we had not used DocAve, it would have taken us longer to complete the migration,” Vivier-Merle said. “More importantly, though, we lost no data quality nor information when moving to the cloud, which would not have been possible without the tool.”
Once its migration was complete, vNext administrators required a tool to manage the company’s SharePoint Online environment. They chose to implement AvePoint Online Services (AOS). Hosted on Microsoft Azure, AOS is a Software-as-a-Service platform that provides enhanced capabilities for management, protection, restructuring, synchronization, and reporting. AOS allows vNext to simplify implementation, management, and enforcement of its governance policies with better control over content, configurations, and security than SharePoint Online’s native features would allow. “AvePoint Online Services gives us an overall view of the SharePoint Online platform while allowing us to better manage sites and security,” Vivier-Merle said. “It also allows us to delegate certain tasks to users – such as content and temporary permissions management – allowing them to be more autonomous.”
Whenever necessary, vNext was able to rely upon AvePoint’s 24/7 technical support and local resources to help resolve any issues. “We appreciate the responsiveness and expertise of AvePoint’s support team, whether our correspondence is by phone, email, or in-person appointments,” Viver-Merle. “We also enjoy the fact that they are able to correspond with us in French.”
With DocAve Migrator, vNext was not only able to simplify and speed up its migration to SharePoint Online, but also migrate all data with full fidelity, ensuring all versions and associated metadata were available to users on the new system. Now fully utilizing SharePoint in the cloud, the organization plans to engage AvePoint Online Services for all aspects of SharePoint management and governance enforcement. “We plan to introduce an Office 365 governance solution to our business, and AvePoint Online Services will be entirely integrated into it,” Vivier-Merle said. “This will allow us to offer more services to our clients.”
vNext is an IT consulting and software developer for Microsoft technologies and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.
DocAve corresponded perfectly to what we needed for our migration from SharePoint 2010 on premises to SharePoint Online.