La solution AvePoint
For help during its journey to the Microsoft Cloud, San Francisco Federal Credit Union selected DocAve Software, AvePoint’s enterprise-class platform for SharePoint migration. “We tested different migration tools in the market but ultimately went with AvePoint,” Adusumilli said. “DocAve not only met our migration requirements, but AvePoint’s technical support team also really impressed me. We had a lot of customizations in SharePoint 2013, so I knew their support would be key to the project’s success.”
Before moving anything to the cloud, Adusumilli used AvePoint’s free Discovery Tool for pre-migration discovery analysis. The tool allows IT to scan its existing environment, providing insight into what data they already have and guidance during migration planning. “The Discovery Tool was very helpful in analyzing existing site collections, subsites, lists, and libraries,” Adusumilli said. “I can see how many I have of each and even their sizes. If a list is about to hit the view threshold, I can flag that and plan accordingly in the cloud.”
Using the Discovery Tool also showed IT where it could eliminate old sites and subsites that they didn’t need to bring to Office 365. Then, with DocAve, the organization was able to selectively migrate only what was needed. “The Discovery Tool reports showed us test sites that I couldn’t see before, which was helpful,” Adusumilli said. “Once we knew what we wanted to move, I scheduled incremental migration jobs and completed our content migration within a week. With DocAve, I was able to restructure subsites where we had issues, and also some lists and layouts along the way.”
Restructuring content would take some time to plan and execute. This is where DocAve helped save the day – its ability to schedule automatic migration jobs allowed Adusumilli to devote time to other aspects of the migration. “I began running migration jobs during business hours, but saw a slight slowdown on our server,” Adusumilli said. “After that, I scheduled jobs to run after business hours and prevented any server performance issues. That way, I don’t need to worry about those jobs during the day and users aren’t impacted.”
As IT worked to configure SharePoint Online, users continued to work in SharePoint 2013. To prevent any work from being lost after migrating the bulk of the company’s content, IT regularly scheduled incremental synchronization jobs. “This way, our users can keep working with critical documents and files without fear of losing any work,” Adusumilli said. “We were also able to migrate our content with full fidelity, which was important to us. Being able to bring metadata meant that our documents continued to be categorized correctly and users could continue to work how they always had with on-premises SharePoint.”
Another key to the company’s migration success was support from AvePoint’s technical team. Although other migration solution providers offered similar functionality, the quality of AvePoint’s support was a major factor as the credit union’s IT team made a decision. “I had a couple of issues during migration that technical support helped me figure out,” Adusumilli said. “They were very responsive and easy to work with.”