Spitäler fmi Saves 50 Hours Copying 200 Microsoft® SharePoint® Sites with Full Fidelity using DocAve®
Success Highlights
Customer Location Unterseen, Switzerland
Industry Health Services
Platform SharePoint 2013
Critical Needs
- Simplify process of copying and creating SharePoint sites
- Retain metadata while restructuring SharePoint environment
- Granularly restore SharePoint content with full fidelity
The Challenge
Spitäler fmi adopted SharePoint to centralize organizational resources and deliver better IT services to its 1,200 end users. SharePoint sites replaced shared drives to enable employees to collaborate better on documents and projects. The organization also uses Nintex Workflow for SharePoint to automate administrative processes such as training requests and procurement.
While it experienced time savings through workflow automation, the company’s IT team still saw the potential to simplify other processes such as site creation. Spitäler fmi needed a solution to ease the burden of copying SharePoint sites while retaining all associated metadata in the process. “Creating sites manually was very repetitive and took up 80 percent of our time,” said Michelle Schläpfer, SharePoint Specialist at Spitäler fmi. “In addition to taking up a lot of our resources, the fact that we had to do this manually meant that we were subject to a certain amount of human error.”
The company also needed more extensive SharePoint backup and restore capabilities. As end users continue to collaborate in SharePoint and create more content, the IT team would need a better way to ensure users’ content – approximately 85 GB with 240,000 list items and growing – is available at all times.
SharePoint Specialist, Spitäler fmi
The AvePoint Solution
To enhance its ability to manage SharePoint, Spitäler fmi implemented AvePoint’s fully integrated platform, DocAve Software. “With AvePoint, we found the solutions we needed,” Schläpfer said. “DocAve allows us to manage multiple aspects of SharePoint from a centralized platform. Knowing that we can easily manage SharePoint with DocAve means we can focus on SharePoint’s growth and development without wasting too much energy on things like backup.”
With DocAve Content Manager, IT can easily copy SharePoint content through ribbon-based controls and easy-to-use wizards. This significantly improves the team’s ability to create SharePoint work spaces and document repositories for its employees and partners, which drives platform adoption. Where previously IT created new sites from scratch, DocAve allows the team to use any site as a template and easily recreate it. “Since we implemented DocAve, we’ve created 200 new sites,” Schläpfer said. “We’ve simplified the process so it takes around 15 minutes to create a new site, where it used to take 45 minutes. Not only has productivity gone up with DocAve, but we’ve also avoided many potential errors in site creation – making us more efficient.”
In addition to copying SharePoint sites, DocAve also allows the organization to easily restructure its environment while retaining all data with full fidelity. This is especially important for Spitäler fmi, because it has the ability to move content such as items, lists, and sites while retaining the relationships with the metadata term store. “With DocAve, it is simple to copy new sites with metadata intact,” Schläpfer said. ”This was not possible with native SharePoint.”
Native SharePoint capabilities also prevented the IT team from conducting backups and restores in a way that met organizational needs. Out-of-the-box, restoring an individual item in SharePoint involves locating the target item in SQL backup, sending it to a staging environment, and possibly losing metadata in the process. “DocAve Backup and Restore not only lets us recover SharePoint content down to the item level, but more importantly, we can granularly restore our Nintex forms and workflows,” Schläpfer said. “As we increase our use of workflows, we can work to optimize them without worrying about losing any work. DocAve allows us to easily restore workflows with full fidelity to keep things running smoothly.”
DocAve also shortens the time it takes IT to restore items, workflows, and sites. “We recently had to restore a complete site,” Schläpfer said. “Using DocAve, the restore process is much less tedious, and we do not worry about losing any data. It is also very easy to use. Team members with different levels of IT experience could learn to perform restores using DocAve.”
The Road Ahead
With DocAve’s content management, backup, and granular restore capabilities, Spitäler fmi’s IT team has optimized how it uses SharePoint. The ability to move, copy, and restore SharePoint content with full fidelity has made DocAve an integral part of its SharePoint management strategy. When copying sites for team collaboration, DocAve saved IT 50 hours of work deploying 200 new sites in addition to ensuring consistency across SharePoint. “We definitely see AvePoint as a trusted partner for the implementation and advancement of our SharePoint strategy,” Schläpfer said. “With DocAve, we were confident that we were purchasing a solution that will continue to be improved and developed to help us manage SharePoint.”
