Oregon Department of Environmental Quality Leverages AvePoint to Migrate & Manage SharePoint for Over Nine Years
Success Highlights
Customer Location Portland, OR
Industry Public Sector
Platform SharePoint 2010
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is the chief regulatory agency of the government of the U.S. state of Oregon responsible for protecting and enhancing the state's natural resources and managing sanitary and toxic waste disposal. The agency employs approximately 700 scientists, engineers, technicians, administrators, and environmental specialists.
Steve Dobrioglo has been with DEQ for over twelve years where he is currently the information systems administrator, mostly focuses on managing web servers and their SharePoint 2010 farm. This entails frequently performing tasks like overseeing site collection administrators.
When it comes to DEQ’s Microsoft investments, they primarily use SharePoint 2010 as a document management system and collaboration space.
Critical Needs
- Migration of workflows and customizations
- Infrastructure reporting to track usage and traffic
- Document-level backup & restore
- Quick and simple reports to investigate permissions
The Challenge
The agency’s original migration into their SharePoint 2010 farm was a complex task. With limited manpower, a pool of customized workflows, and a restricted timeline, the team knew a third-party migration tool would need to be adopted.
While SharePoint has helpful management controls, managing permissions, and dead accounts through SharePoint’s native functionality was becoming rigorous and time consuming for DEQ.
Information Systems Admin, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality
The AvePoint Solution
After evaluating much of the market, Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality decided that AvePoint’s DocAve suite met both their upcoming SharePoint 2019 migration needs and foreseeable management requirements.
“DocAve had a lot more functionality past migration for managing content and users. Many things that we wouldn’t have envisioned,” said Dobrioglo. “Like copying content from one place to another, cleaning dead accounts, setting up delegated permissions, and more. Doing these things manually was way too time intensive.”
In almost nine years of experience with Docave, the most heavily used modules within that suite have been Administrator, Report Center, and Backup & Restore.
Administrator: AvePoint’s Administrator tool has a lot of functionality from managing permissions, to reporting and enforcing policies. “I primarily use it for copying permissions in batch and doing regular clean ups of dead accounts,” said Dobrioglo.
He explained, reports sometimes will show when incorrect permission rights have been granted. “I often pull reports to investigate permissions. This saves me a lot of time, because I would natively have to do so much, even requiring me to write PowerShell.”
Report Center: DEQ is currently leveraging Report Center for infrastructure reports. The reports include documents that specific people are using, storage usage, and traffic reports to help determine what is being used and what has gone stale. This can help the agency determine what actions need to be taken on certain content when managing the overall environment.
“As an Administrator, it allows me to see activity in my SharePoint farm and optimize it for the best performance. I see everything that’s going on from who created what, to who has access, and more. These reports are very helpful since we are planning a migration soon,” said Dobrioglo.
Backup & Restore: Native backup functionality doesn’t offer much flexibility and can be a clunky task. Pair that with the inability to restore anything lower than the site level, and you have yourself a time-consuming task.
“Backup & Restore has given me so many more options. The ability to restore at a document level has been so helpful. I can choose exactly what I want to restore without have to restore a whole site,” said Dobrioglo.
The Road Ahead
Even after nine years, Dobrioglo and Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality are excited to keep learning more about how DocAve can be used as their SharePoint usage grows.
“I love the tool and there is still so much to learn since it’s so complex and flexible making it a big advantage,” said Dobrioglo.
The roadmap for DEQ is to migrate to SharePoint 2019 using AvePoint’s solutions.
