Unigarant Migrates Microsoft SharePoint Data 94% Faster and Reduces Content Database Storage by 56% with DocAve
Success Highlights
Customer Location Hoogeveen, Netherlands
Industry Insurance
Platform SharePoint 2010
Critical Needs
- Expedited migration from SharePoint 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 to SharePoint 2010
- Automated migration job scheduling to occur during off-peak hours, limiting business disruption
- Retention of data’s full fidelity upon migration
The Challenge
Unigarant utilizes Microsoft SharePoint as a means to share information throughout the company and allow its employees to collaborate better. Approximately 500 end-users access the platform.
Content stored on Unigarant’s SharePoint environment include manuals for IT-related tasks, information from Human Resources, as well as resources for the company’s products that are accessed by call center employees. “By utilizing SharePoint, our employees have easy access to the latest information, which helps them keep customers informed about our offerings,” said Rinze van der Kooi, ICT Specialist at Unigarant.
The company was utilizing two different versions of SharePoint – SharePoint 2003 and MOSS 2007 – and decided to upgrade to a newer version of the platform, SharePoint 2010. However, Microsoft offered no native functionality to upgrade SharePoint 2003 environments directly to SharePoint 2010. “The features in SharePoint 2003, especially, were quite out of date, so we needed to upgrade our environment,” said van der Kooi. “We needed the ability to migrate documents from both SharePoint 2003 and MOSS 2007 environments directly to the new SharePoint 2010 environment,” said van der Kooi.
With the need for a swift migration to SharePoint 2010 from multiple legacy environments, Unigarant began to search for a third-party software solution.
ICT Specialist, Unigarant
The AvePoint Solution
After researching various options, Unigarant administrators selected DocAve Migrator – part of AvePoint’s DocAve Software Platform. “DocAve had the functional requirements necessary to carry out our SharePoint migration,” said van der Kooi.
DocAve Migrator allows organizations to quickly consolidate enterprise content from previous SharePoint versions to SharePoint 2010. With DocAve, Unigarant administrators were able to migrate documents from both SharePoint 2003 and MOSS 2007 environments directly into its new SharePoint 2010 environment. This offered a significant time savings to Unigarant, as they would have had to carry out the migration manually without DocAve. “We would have needed to select all content and download it to the new environment individually, which would have taken a full year,” said van der Kooi. “With DocAve, we were able to complete the migration in three weeks.”
Thanks to DocAve, Unigarant was able to ensure all information critical to the business was kept intact throughout the migration process. All folder structures, document properties, associated metadata, permissions, and access control are retained with full fidelity with DocAve. “Following the migration, we planned on getting rid of our old SharePoint servers, so it was very important that all data was migrated seamlessly and in full,” said van der Kooi. “DocAve is a powerful tool for ensuring all necessary data is migrated and it allows you to keep track of progress easily.”
DocAve also enabled Unigarant to be selective in what content it migrated, effectively reducing storage in the new environment. Administrators can migrate entire SharePoint instances, folders, or even individual content items. “Between our two legacy environments, we had approximately 385 GB of SharePoint data,” said van der Kooi. “With DocAve, we were able to avoid migrating unnecessary data as well as reorganize upon migration, effectively migrating approximately 112 GB from the legacy environments into the new one.”
With DocAve’s flexible job scheduling abilities, Unigarant was able to ensure all aspects of the migration process were carried out according to organizational needs. “DocAve offered us the flexibility to schedule whenever our migration jobs took place,” van der Kooi said. “Our migration jobs were scheduled to take place during evenings and weekends to minimize disruption for our end users.”
Throughout its migration, Unigarant relied upon AvePoint’s live, 24/7 technical support team when assistance was needed. “DocAve was easy to use, but AvePoint’s technical support team helped us whenever we had questions about settings to ensure our migration completed as planned,” said van der Kooi.
The Road Ahead
With DocAve, Unigarant was able to upgrade its SharePoint environment from two legacy versions of the platform directly to SharePoint 2010 according to its specific needs while saving significant time and business disruption in the process. “With SharePoint 2010, our organization can work together faster and more flexibly than ever before,” said van der Kooi. “DocAve made the SharePoint migration process quicker and more reliable.”