Airbus Helicopters Reduces Microsoft SharePoint Content Database by 59% and Centralizes Data from Legacy Systems with DocAve
Success Highlights
Customer Location Marignane, France
Industry Manufacturing
Platform SharePoint 2010
Critical Needs
- Automatic movement of SharePoint data onto less expensive storage devices according to business rules
- Swift migration of legacy content from EMC Documentum eRoom to SharePoint
- Swift, simplified movement of content within SharePoint
- Access to legacy file share content through SharePoint
The Challenge
With its main facilities dispersed throughout France, Germany, and Spain, Airbus Helicopters implemented Microsoft SharePoint in order to help all of its departments collaborate and manage documents through one centralized, business-critical system. The company has approximately 10,000 end-users accessing SharePoint. “SharePoint has begun to replace previously used systems, such as EMC Documentum eRoom and file shares,” said Lothar Hanke, Head of Collaboration and Document Management at Airbus Helicopters. “The platform continues to become more and more important to the business.”
Before the platform was rolled out to the company, Airbus Helicopters administrators required a storage solution in order to efficiently manage its Microsoft SQL Server content database for optimal performance. Since SharePoint did not have a native solution to store binary large objects (BLOBs) – which SQL Server is not designed to store – externally according to Airbus Helicopters’s specific business rules, the administrators began to search for a third-party solution.
Head of Collaboration and Document Management, Airbus Helicopters
The AvePoint Solution
Airbus Helicopters chose to implement AvePoint’s DocAve Software Platform – the enterprise-class management platform for SharePoint governance – which offered the storage optimization solutions the organization needed and more. “AvePoint was the perfect choice because it has been around since 2001 and has a great deal of experience with SharePoint as a Microsoft Gold Partner,” said Hanke. “DocAve offered the world’s leading SharePoint storage optimization solutions as well as products to solve other challenges around migration, administration, and content management.”
AvePoint’s Storage Optimization Solution enabled Airbus Helicopters to externalize SharePoint storage beyond SQL Server by using Microsoft’s Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) application programming interface (API) to improve performance and reduce storage costs. DocAve enabled rule-driven storage tiering so that 550 GB of BLOB data was stored outside of SQL Server according to the company’s business needs, while end-users could seamlessly access all content within SharePoint. As a result, Airbus Helicopters’s SQL Server content database was reduced by approximately 59 percent to 380 GB. “DocAve has improved the management and storage of our data and reduced our storage costs overall,” Hanke said.
As SharePoint became Airbus Helicopters’s primary system for collaboration and document management, the company needed to move collaborative workspaces and document libraries from its legacy deployment of Documentum eRoom to SharePoint in order to centralize content for employees. DocAve enabled administrators to easily automate the process of consolidating 40 GB of eRoom content into SharePoint with its web-based interface. “DocAve is easy to use for migration,” said Mathieu Ramond, SharePoint Project Leader at Airbus Helicopters.
Within DocAve Content Manager, Airbus Helicopters was able to move content according to business and end-user. DocAve comprehensively moves, copies, and restructures SharePoint sites, content, and topology within or across SharePoint environments through a centralized management console. “DocAve allows us to easily move data from one site to another for our end-users,” Hanke said.
The Road Ahead
As use of SharePoint continues to grow throughout Airbus Helicopters, administrators will turn to additional DocAve products within the fully integrated platform to solve management and governance challenges they face. The company is implementing DocAve File Share Navigator, which helps administrators consolidate file server access into SharePoint and provides local or remote end-user access without degrading SharePoint performance, allowing end-users to be able to view and access legacy file share content through SharePoint without requiring migration. “As SharePoint becomes our company’s main collaboration platform, DocAve is integral in enabling our end-users to access the information they need through the platform,” Ramond said.
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