DocAve fit perfectly into our plan to integrate the cloud into our IT strategy and create a bridge between our cloud-based and on-premises SharePoint environments.
As a business dedicated to delivering software solutions to organizations throughout France, the technology that SILOG uses plays an important role in fulfilling its mission. As such, the organization has relied on SharePoint since 2008 as a platform to store all of its enterprise content. “Each team has its own ‘work environment’ in SharePoint with lists and libraries that are used for collaboration,” said Martial Auroy, Technology Advisor at SILOG. “Employees can also access organizational information through public libraries with documents that are available to all users.”
SharePoint is a critical system for SILOG, with more than 40,000 unique documents stored on the platform across 10 team sites and a public document library. The organization also uses the platform to house software demo videos to help educate employees. With its use of the platform expanding, SILOG looked to the Microsoft Cloud as the next step in its SharePoint evolution. Moving its document libraries to Office 365 – SharePoint Online would enable the organization to access the latest platform features before they were available on premises as well as tap into the improved mobile access and unlimited scalability of the cloud.
However, Microsoft native capabilities would not allow SILOG to migrate select content directly from its SharePoint 2010 instance to SharePoint Online. In order to carry out a seamless transition to a hybrid SharePoint environment and fill native functionality gaps, the organization sought a third-party solution. “Using out-of-the-box upgrade capabilities, we would lose the version history and metadata associated with our documents,” Auroy said. “We also found that SharePoint lacked some key capabilities for managing a hybrid environment, including moving content across sites and backing up and restoring according to business needs.”
SILOG chose to implement DocAve for its SharePoint and Office 365 migration and management needs. As a fully integrated platform, DocAve enables centralized or delegated management of SharePoint farms hosted on premises, or in private and public clouds such as Office 365. “AvePoint appealed to us most, as it offered the most complete platform for SharePoint and Office 365 management,” Auroy said.
SILOG’s first order of business was to migrate its content to Office 365. DocAve supports all stages of a migration with assessment, planning, and reporting capabilities to efficiently transition to the latest versions of SharePoint or Office 365 – SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business with minimal business disruption. With DocAve, SILOG was not only able to migrate directly to SharePoint Online in one month – a time savings of 83 percent over native capabilities – but it was also able to maintain data integrity and ensure no information was lost in the move to the cloud. “If we hadn’t used DocAve for our Office 365 migration, we would have needed to hire a full-time resource for at least six months to complete the project, and there would have been a greater risk of data loss,” said Auroy. “DocAve definitely saved us time and money.”
Once its Office 365 migration was complete, SILOG was able to continue to rely on DocAve for its hybrid management capabilities. The tool enables SILOG to comprehensively move, copy, and restructure SharePoint content within or across environments hosted both on premises and in the cloud with no interruption to business processes. Administrators can also use DocAve to easily change SharePoint settings, configurations, and permissions in bulk at any object level throughout the hybrid environment. “We often have to reorganize team sites and libraries, and user permissions can get messy,” said Auroy. “With DocAve, we don’t have to worry about SharePoint versions – it gives us a single tool to manage both content and permissions on premises and in the cloud.”
DocAve also enables SILOG to protect its SharePoint content across its hybrid environment. DocAve provides full-fidelity backup and recovery – from individual content items to entire SharePoint environments – maintaining all metadata, security settings, and version histories. With DocAve, SILOG runs a full backup of his hybrid environment – including SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint on premises –monthly and differential backups of new data created every week. All backups are hosted in the cloud on Azure storage.
While implementing DocAve and carrying out its migration project, SILOG relied on AvePoint’s 24/7, multilingual technical support team whenever necessary. “We leveraged the AvePoint support team’s extensive experience and knowledge to help get our project started,” Auroy said. “I’ve rarely encountered such high quality support, and they ensured our objectives were met through frequent interactions.”
By engaging AvePoint, SILOG was not only able to easily transition to the Microsoft Cloud, but also ensure that any roadblocks to productivity and effective collaboration were resolved across its hybrid SharePoint environment. “DocAve fit perfectly into our plan to integrate the cloud into our IT strategy and create a bridge between our cloud-based and on-premises SharePoint environments,” Auroy said.
For 31 years, SILOG has been a software editor and ERP solution integrator dedicated to the small- and medium-sized business (SMB) market. SILOG helps more than 1,250 organizations in various industries, including agrifood, plastics, electronics, pharmacology, and chemistry.
DocAve fit perfectly into our plan to integrate the cloud into our IT strategy and create a bridge between our cloud-based and on-premises SharePoint environments.