Leale Solutions Uses DocAve to Migrate Microsoft SharePoint Content for a Medical Center with 4,000 End Users
Success Highlights
Customer Location Boynton Beach, FL
Industry Technology
Platform SharePoint 2010
Critical Needs
- Fast and flexible data migration from one version of SharePoint to another while preserving all associated metadata with full fidelity
- The ability to migrate content without disrupting end users by allowing them to continuallyaccess the source environment until all data is moved to the destination
The Challenge
A medical center based in the northeast United States provided SharePoint as a collaboration, information sharing, and document management platform for 4,000 employees across 200 departments. Each department made use of the platform in its own unique way. The nursing department, for example, utilized SharePoint to manage scheduling and house official documentation for nurses on staff.
The center’s SharePoint environment was running on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and Windows Server 2003. When Microsoft announced that it would no longer support Windows Server 2003 as of July 2015, the center knew it needed to upgrade its environment in order to stay in compliance with industry regulations by receiving critical security updates from Microsoft.
Because the feature set was similar to MOSS 2007, the organization decided to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 to eliminate the need for end user training. In order to carry out the migration in a way that would be completed before Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 support ended and not disrupt operations, the center brought in Leale Solutions to help. As a consulting firm specializing in Microsoft technologies, the Leale team quickly went to work understanding the migration project scope. “Our COO and I spent three days looking at the center’s environment and talking to business users to fully understand the scenario,” said Neil Kilpatrick, VP of Technology at Leale Solutions. “Because time was such an important factor, we knew we would need a third-party software solution to carry out the project as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
VP of Technology, Leale Solutions
The AvePoint Solution
Due to its experience using the solution for previous SharePoint migrations, Leale chose to use AvePoint’s DocAve Migrator – part of the fully integrated DocAve Software Platform for SharePoint infrastructure management. DocAve Migrator provides an efficient, cost-effective solution for migrating business-critical content to SharePoint. “Our main requirements for a migration tool were flexibility and ease-of-use, and we knew DocAve could deliver in both of those areas,” Kilpatrick said. “We also trusted AvePoint’s support team, and the fact that it was available to help us 24 hours a day was a big selling point to the client.”
After the migration discovery and planning phases, Leale began to carry out the migration process with DocAve. In order to eliminate the possibility of business disruption, Leale was able to allow users to continue working in the MOSS 2007 environment while migrating data to SharePoint 2010. This would not have been possible using SharePoint’s native database-attach upgrade method. Once the initial job was complete for each site collection, Leale would schedule incremental migrations to take place outside of business hours to ensure all new data created was available in the SharePoint 2010 environment once it was approved by each department to go live. “Working with hundreds of departments who rely on SharePoint, the ability to not have any downtime was huge,” Kilpatrick said. “DocAve helped us ensure that operations were not disrupted and all data was synchronized with the new environment when it was ready for use.”
When transferring content between the source and destination, Leale was able to preserve all metadata for the center’s content, including security settings, attributes, and properties. This helped ease the transition for users and ensured everything was left intact in the new environment. “Carrying out the migration with full fidelity was very important to the client,” Kilpatrick said. “DocAve allowed us to move all content over to the new system so it matched the old environment one-for-one.”
Within four months, Leale was able to migrate approximately 400 gigabytes of content and 300 site collections, completing the project on time for the center as planned. Throughout the migration, AvePoint’s technical support team proved to be a reliable partner. “If we ran into an issue, AvePoint’s support team always found a solution and delivered the functionality we needed,” Kilpatrick said.
The Road Ahead
Now on SharePoint 2010 and fully supported by Microsoft, the center’s long term goal is to upgrade to SharePoint 2013 in order to provide employees access to enhanced social collaboration features. In the meantime, the center will be able to take advantage of additional AvePoint solutions for SharePoint administration and content management through DocAve’s centralized platform. “The client was very happy with the migration,” Kilpatrick said. “From the account managers to the support team, everyone at AvePoint really helped ensure it was a success.”