Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel Saves 50% of the Time Required to Migrate to Microsoft SharePoint Online with DocAve
Success Highlights
Customer Location Worley, ID
Industry Entertainment
Platform SharePoint Online
Critical Needs
- Automated, full-fidelity migration to SharePoint Online from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
- Comprehensive content management within a SharePoint Online environment
The Challenge
In order to host its company intranet and facilitate collaboration amongst workers, CCRH implemented SharePoint. The organization began to rely on the platform’s out-of-the-box features, including centralized calendars that users could access to enter and keep track of all upcoming events at the resort. SharePoint also provided an avenue to compile security incidents, medical reports, and job descriptions. Additionally, document libraries were used to share documents in order to ease organization-wide collaboration efforts. “SharePoint’s ability to allow checking out documents cleared up headaches associated with workers accessing documents in shared folders at the same time.”
After hosting its MOSS 2007 environment on premises for several years, CCRH ultimately decided to upgrade to SharePoint Online through cloud-based Microsoft Office 365. The upgrade would allow CCRH administrators to reduce hardware expenses, scale its environment with greater ease, and save the five hours per week required to maintain on-premises servers. “With SharePoint Online, if we reach a point where we need new capacity, we don’t have to worry about hardware because Microsoft will handle that for us,” said RyAnne Abrahamson, IT Systems Technician at CCRH. “The less we have to administer here on site, the happier we are.” In order to migrate to SharePoint Online, Abrahamson decided a third-party software solution was necessary. “I’ve done three previous migrations on my own, so I knew that it would be a time consuming and tedious process,” Abrahamson said. “Taking my other responsibilities into account, I estimated the migration to SharePoint Online would take approximately two years of my time without third-party software.”
IT Systems Technician, Coeur D’Alene Casino Resort Hotel
The AvePoint Solution
Through her conversations with Microsoft, Abrahamson learned about AvePoint’s DocAve Software Platform – the enterprise-class management platform for SharePoint governance. DocAve Migrator enables quick consolidation of enterprise content from previous SharePoint versions into SharePoint Online. “I saw a demo and saw how easy it was to use DocAve,” Abrahamson said. “It only took me about ten minutes to learn how to use it.”
Abrahamson was able to utilize DocAve to automatically move content from MOSS 2007 to mapped elements in SharePoint Online. DocAve’s single web-based user interface enabled simplified, swift completion of migration jobs. “I was able to migrate a list with 30,000 items directly to SharePoint Online in ten minutes with DocAve,” Abrahamson said. “That would have taken me at least an hour and a half without the software.”
DocAve’s granular content migration and customizable job scheduling abilities allowed Abrahamson to plan the migration according to CCRH’s business needs and timetables. By selectively migrating only the content that was needed in the new environment, Abrahamson was able to reduce CCRH’s total SharePoint data by approximately 14 percent upon migration. “We had an event calendar with more than 400,000 entries, and not all of it needed to be carried over to SharePoint Online,” Abrahamson said. “With DocAve, I was able to set a filter with conditions that would only migrate items created after January 2012, so we were only migrating recent and relevant information to our business.”
Throughout the migration process, DocAve ensured all folder structures, document properties, and associated metadata, as well as permissions and access controls, were retained with full fidelity. “One of the biggest concerns in a migration is that someone might get access to something they’re not supposed to when you’re setting up permissions in the new environment,” Abrahamson said. “By automating the migration with DocAve and retaining all permissions throughout the process, we were able to ensure compliance with our internal policies.”
In addition to DocAve Migrator, Abrahamson was able to use DocAve Content Manager to easily restructure content within CCRH’s SharePoint Online environment. “DocAve Content Manager was so easy to use,” Abrahamson said. “You just click where you want the content to go and it just goes, taking permissions and metadata with it.”
The Road Ahead
With DocAve, CCRH was able to complete its migration from its on-premises MOSS 2007 environment to an Office 365-hosted SharePoint Online environment in half the time the migration would have taken without the software. Abrahamson used DocAve to move a total of 40 sites to SharePoint Online. Throughout the process, Abrahamson worked closely with AvePoint’s live, 24/7 technical support team whenever she needed assistance. “AvePoint’s technical support team was patient, friendly, knowledgeable, and understood what was going on without requiring me to send logs over and over again,” Abrahamson said. “They are the reason you buy DocAve.”