AvePoint was really the only one that provided that all-encompassing suite of migration knowledge, capabilities and tools to get our SharePoint upgraded to where we wanted it to be.
With their SharePoint 2007 environment reaching the end of life for Microsoft support, the Bank of Hawaii decided to migrate their 2,300 users to SharePoint 2013. This would create deeper integrations within their collaboration ecosystem and maximize their use of Word and Outlook 2013 Bank of Hawaii knew there was no direct path from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013 using native solutions. It was also imperative to avoid the business disruption and costs that would occur with a “double jump” across SharePoint versions from 2007 to 2010 and then to 2013. As a result, Bank of Hawaii decided to examine third-party tools that could help with their migration.
“We chose AvePoint because obviously they’re a leader in the SharePoint space and have a wealth of knowledge and any time we engaged them they were happy to demonstrate that knowledge in a way that was really useful for us,” said Bank of Hawaii Vice President of Information Technology, Kevin Byrne.
“Even though we knew they were selling something it never really felt like that, it just felt like they were telling us the right way we should go about things and always seemed to be customer-focused with our best interest at heart.”
The Bank of Hawaii also had unique SharePoint customizations that it wanted to preserve in its migration and found AvePoint tools could assist with those customizations.
“Other vendors were selling just part of the solution and we didn’t like that. We wanted one vendor to help us with the whole thing, or else it would’ve been a large management headache for us,” said Kevin.
The Bank of Hawaii also wanted to replace their Microsoft FrontPage intranet solution with a custom SharePoint portal to improve their internal communications.
The Bank of Hawaii knew not only was some of that obsolete but that it was hosting multiple SharePoint sites that had been set up but not touched in years.
As a result, the bank decided to take the opportunity to closely examine their content. By only migrating 200 GB of their 250 GB data, the bank was able to accelerate the migration while lowering the cost and ensuring a more organized collaboration ecosystem for their end-users.
“The tools and the services provided by the AvePoint team were instrumental in making sure we got what we needed,” said Kevin. “The total time savings from working with AvePoint was really significant. With AvePoint we were able to pick up the content and just move it across, otherwise we would still be currently moving content today.”
The bank also decided to examine their content procedures and governance policy to ensure their users organized and retained data in their SharePoint environment appropriately.
As part of this process, the Bank of Hawaii is leveraging AvePoint's Governance Automation solution, which automates the provisioning, maintenance and expiration of SharePoint sites according to their policy.
It has been a success with the IT team fielding fewer support tickets for common tasks such as creating SharePoint lists and libraries while maintaining data integrity.
“Governance Automation let us prove that the bank can scale its SharePoint services for its internal users without having to increase our IT technical team resources,” said Kevin.
As part of the migration, the Bank of Hawaii also requested a custom SharePoint intranet portal be developed to improve their internal communications. This was important to the team as the corporate intranet is the first thing employees see when they open their browser.
“The SharePoint portal interface is a lot cleaner and a lot more modern, due to AvePont helping us build a clean, modern-looking interface,” said Kevin. “Our employees can now see a well-formed user interface while using tablets rather than trying to squeeze everything in lower resolution.”
With SharePoint teams and project sites being used daily, with improved search capabilities and co-authoring ability, the Bank of Hawaii is really pleased with their new heavily and well-used SharePoint environment.
The bank has several things in the pipeline for the future of their SharePoint environment including the implementation of AvePoint Compliance Guardian which will provide them data classification, protection and incident management capabilities.
The Bank of Hawaii is also looking to create a suite of enterprise content management tools so that when content is created and stored on SharePoint they can archive it away for future reference, providing a full content lifecycle for Bank of Hawaii users.
“All in all, we’ve were impressed by the AvePoint team that has supported us throughout the migration. The dedication of the AvePoint team and their flexibility were key points that really made this project a success”, said Kevin. “I felt like I had all the information at-hand, readily available when decisions needed to be made and I felt very confident that we were going to execute successfully at all points during the project.”
The Bank of Hawaii Corporation is a regional commercial bank headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii. It is Hawaii’s second oldest bank and it is the largest locally owned bank in that the majority of the voting stockholders reside within the state. Bank of Hawaii has the most accounts, customers, branches, and ATMs of any financial institution in the state, and consists of four business segments: retail banking, commercial banking, investment services, and treasury.
AvePoint was really the only one that provided that all-encompassing suite of migration knowledge, capabilities and tools to get our SharePoint upgraded to where we wanted it to be.