We liked DocAve’s comprehensive nature and knew that we could turn on new features as required as we continued to utilise SharePoint more.
The WH SharePoint platform deployment project is part of a wider organisation ICT Strategy to transition from paper reliant and manual intensive work flows to paper light, automated workflows. Following significant progress in a range of clinical e-health solutions, the SharePoint platform deployment significantly advances a streamlined and automated corporate systems environment across the network. The scope of the initial WH SharePoint deployment includes: internet upgrade, intranet upgrade, extranet provisioning, document and records management upgrade, and provisioning of employee self-service form automation. “It’s great to be able to take advantage of the significant technology environment investment that WH has made to progress clinical e-health solutions and provision leading-edge corporate workflow solutions,” said Jason Whakaari, Executive Director – ICT, Capital, & Contracts at WH.
With 15 gigabytes (GB) of data on its intranet environment and terabytes of records management data soon to be added, WH needed to ensure its system was properly protected. Since SharePoint did not offer the means to restore data at a granular level quickly and easily, WH administrators began to search for a third-party solution. “Our SharePoint platform is a significant investment for the organisation,” said Cameron McBride, Manager – Systems & Software Solutions at WH. “We wanted something that was focused on SharePoint specifically and could help us as our requirements grew.”
With an expressed need for a solution that would grow with the organisation’s business-critical SharePoint environment, WH began to diligently research options. Australian IT services company OBS put the administrators in touch with its partner AvePoint, and after researching, the company chose to implement AvePoint’s DocAve Software Platform – the enterprise-class management platform for SharePoint governance. “OBS know that managing SharePoint can be challenging for large or complex organisations without specialised training,” said Rick De Marco, Partner & Portfolio Manager at OBS. “AvePoint offered the perfect toolset for Western Health to ensure that its back-up and restore functions were robust.”
WH was immediately impressed with the breadth, scope, and scalability of the products available through DocAve’s centralised platform. “We liked DocAve’s comprehensive nature and knew that we could turn on new features as required as we continued to utilise SharePoint more,” McBride said.
To protect its SharePoint data, WH implemented DocAve Backup and Restore. DocAve offers business-aware, comprehensive, SLA-driven protection of SharePoint environments. With DocAve, WH administrators were able to set up a backup plan that took into account the organisation’s specific needs, including standard differential and full backups each weekend. “We run our backups with DocAve over the weekend during lower peak hours to avoid business disruption,” McBride said.
DocAve enables WH to granularly restore content – down to the item-level – to the original media and process it in a live SharePoint environment during standard hours of operation without interrupting the flow of business. WH’s SLA for content recovery is eight hours, but DocAve enables the administrators to restore documents in only minutes – 99 percent faster than the organisational requirement. “As we go down the path of Business Process Automation, we are increasing the utilisation of SharePoint. This will require the system to be operating efficiently,” McBride said. “DocAve enables us to maintain users’ confidence and minimise downtime by being able to get back the data they need quickly so their trust in SharePoint is not diminished.”
Throughout WH’s implementation and use of DocAve, the administrators were also confident in AvePoint’s live, 24/7 technical support team when any challenges or questions arose. “When we encountered an issue during our implementation, AvePoint provided the support we needed quickly and had a patch we could implement within a few days to solve the challenge,” McBride said.
With a large SharePoint implementation and plans to expand its system for many critical needs throughout the organisation, WH needed a solution that could grow and evolve along with its environment. DocAve provided the immediate data protection the organisation sought along with the ability to implement additional products for management, optimisation, reporting, integration, and migration through one centralised, fully integrated platform as future needs arose. “SharePoint’s a complex product and it requires a significant amount of governance and structure from the beginning,” Whakaari said. “Due to the changes that occur regularly within a large organisation, we need to be agile and ensure our system does not become unusable in the process. We look to AvePoint to leverage its lessons learned and be guided throughout our implementation with its expertise and products.”
Western Health (WH) is a major metropolitan health service network servicing the western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. WH has four acute hospitals and a range of support services, a staff base of approximately 6,000, and serves a population of approximately 800,000 across eight Local Government Municipalities.
We liked DocAve’s comprehensive nature and knew that we could turn on new features as required as we continued to utilise SharePoint more.