KPN Migrates 4.1 TB of Microsoft SharePoint Data 79% Faster with DocAve
Success Highlights
Customer Location Zoetermeer, Netherlands
Industry Technology
Platform SharePoint 2010
Critical Needs
- Expedited migration from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2010
- Automated migration job scheduling to occur during off-peak hours, limiting business disruption
The Challenge
Since 2005, KPN has used Microsoft SharePoint throughout the organization to support team collaboration, information sharing, business processes, and management reporting. The platform is also heavily used by the organization to support case management – with approximately 5,000 site collections dedicated to this purpose.
Over the years, KPN accumulated approximately 4.6 TB of data and more than 11,000 site collections within SharePoint. In addition to standard documents like Word documents, PDFs, and Excel workbooks, SharePoint housed list-based information and InfoPath forms which were used to determine business performance, support innovation, and share status information on service requests from customers.
Eventually, KPN decided to upgrade its deployment from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2010. “We felt the platform’s abilities were too limited in respect to lifecycle management and it was increasingly becoming difficult to operate in terms of capacity management and content retention,” said Els Olthof, IT Project Manager at KPN. “A migration was required.”
Since Microsoft’s native functionality did not provide a direct path from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2010 and KPN was on a tight deadline to complete the project, the organization explored software solutions for the migration.
IT Project Manager, KPN
The AvePoint Solution
KPN Consulting (assigned with the migration challenge) investigated several solutions and ultimately chose DocAve Migrator – part of AvePoint’s DocAve Software Platform. “DocAve matched KPN’s functional requirements for a migration solution” according to Andries den Haan, Lead SharePoint Consultant at KPN. “AvePoint also provided the professional support we could rely on throughout the migration process.”
DocAve Migrator allows organizations to quickly consolidate enterprise content from previous SharePoint versions to SharePoint 2010. In addition to completing the migration within a specific timeframe, KPN needed to minimize business disruption for its employees during working hours. Thanks to DocAve’s flexible job scheduling capabilities, KPN was able to plan migration jobs according to its specific needs. “With DocAve, we could ensure migration jobs took place on nights and weekends,” said Olthof. “KPN’s employees were able to continue to access SharePoint during business hours without disruption while we migrated 75 to 100 GB per night on average with DocAve.”
For its 5,000 case management site collections, KPN Consulting needed to map SharePoint 2003 metadata columns to SharePoint 2010 content types as well as convert specific SharePoint 2003 field values to SharePoint 2010 managed metadata values. With DocAve, KPN Consulting was able to create these specific mappings to ensure all data was migrated smoothly and quickly into the new environment. “DocAve enabled us to migrate all 5,000 case management sites to the upgraded SharePoint environment within two weeks,” den Haan said.
Throughout the migration process, it was critical that KPN be able to retain metadata and security settings for all of its data. Administrators also needed to be able to filter out dated, obsolete content upon migration. With its flexible, full fidelity migration capabilities, DocAve met all of these requirements. “DocAve ensured all information critical to our business was kept intact,” Andries den Haan said. “It also gave us granular migration capabilities, enabling us to reduce approximately 11 percent of our data – all of which was old and not needed in the new environment.”
KPN Consulting was able to rely on AvePoint’s live, 24/7 technical support throughout its migration. “It was important we be able to access professional technical support for the product whenever needed,” den Haan said. “AvePoint’s support team helped us resolve issues we encountered involving firewalls and resource permissions quickly.”
The Road Ahead
In addition to providing all of the technical functionality and support KPN required to simplify its SharePoint upgrade and ensure all data was properly migrated, DocAve also enabled the migration to be completed within the planned time frame. In the end, KPN Consulting was able to migrate approximately 4.1 TB and more than 8,000 site collections within two and a half months, which was 79 percent faster than it would have taken without DocAve. Due to the success of the migration project, KPN Consulting is currently investigating ways the organization could benefit from other fully integrated products within the DocAve Software Platform. “Now that our SharePoint 2010 environment is up and running, we may evaluate additional tools from DocAve to help ensure compliance with internal and external policies as well as improvement of content and site lifecycle management,” den Haan said.