La solution AvePoint
In keeping with its enterprise cloud strategy, PartyLite Europe Technology implemented AvePoint Online Services (AOS), a fully Azure-hosted SaaS offering for Office 365 management. Requiring no installation or agents, AOS allows admins to manage SharePoint Online the same way its employees access the platform – from anywhere, anytime. “Every IT employee can access data from anywhere as soon as it is required,” Lampert said. “Just like with Office 365, we know we’re always working with the latest version of AvePoint Online Services and don’t need to perform any upgrades.”
With AvePoint Online Services' flexible backup capabilities, PartyLite Europe Technology’s IT team can create a schedule and retention rules that work best for its needs. Admins schedule automatic backup jobs to run nightly. They take advantage of platform-level backups once a week and schedule incremental jobs four times a week. “Having AOS as a backup solution is a big advantage for us because it requires little effort,” Lampert said. “We are assured that, should we need to restore content in the cloud, data integrity is guaranteed because AOS preserves metadata.”
In addition to making cloud backup easier to manage, AvePoint Online Services also helps PartyLite Europe Technology demonstrate compliance with legal retention requirements. “German law requires the organization to preserve financial and email data for up to 10 years and also provide proof of regular backups,” Lampert said. “AOS records backup job statuses, which can help in case of an audit.”
With AOS' content management capabilities, IT has improved its ability to deploy SharePoint Online content to the production environment. “We can develop things like site collections or subsites in a test environment then copy or move it to production without having to set things up from zero,” Lampert said. “This saves us huge amounts of time because we can copy content with full fidelity.”
Admins also save time with AvePoint Online Services when granting SharePoint Online access to new users. Instead of having to set permissions manually on individual sites and site collections, admins can clone permissions and transfer them to another user. “We use AOS' administration capabilities to manage rights in bulk,” Lampert said. “This is an advantage when, for example, someone leaves the company and we want to assign permissions to someone else who is taking over responsibilities.”