De AvePoint oplossing
Assumption High School’s IT team considered multiple Office 365 migration solutions on the market, but ultimately engaged AvePoint Client Services to run the project. Lacking the right experience internally, IT chose AvePoint’s Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS) to fill in the SharePoint migration knowledge gaps. “We had worked with a consultant who used AvePoint’s migration software, DocAve Migrator,” Koch said. “While that project was unsuccessful, it had nothing to do with the software. We heard positive reviews about AvePoint, and of course they knew how to use their own product. And importantly, they assured us they could get it done by the time school started.”
With help from AvePoint’s services team, Assumption High School’s IT team spent two months planning the migration, reviewing the organization’s requirements and assessing the source environment. They mostly did a one-to-one migration, except for a few select libraries in SharePoint 2013 where they applied special rules. “To help speed up the migration a bit, we decided to apply filter policies to certain libraries,” Koch said. “In some cases, we just wanted to bring one year worth of data instead of three. That was a nice option to have in our migration plan.”
By working with AvePoint, IT benefited from the ability to incrementally migrate chunks of data to its new environment. In total, the organization moved 100 gigabytes (GB) to SharePoint Online. “The migration itself only took a couple of days,” Koch said. “Because we were able to maintain all metadata, it was seamless for students, teachers, and staff – only IT was aware of the migration. We experienced zero downtime, which was one of the biggest benefits of using AvePoint’s migration services.”
Throughout the migration project, AvePoint’s services team acted as a partner to Assumption High School’s IT team. Communication and support were key to the success of the organization’s migration to the cloud. “AvePoint explained everything very clearly throughout the entire process,” Koch said. “We had great support from their entire team. They worked on our migration project with me after school hours when I could give it more attention, and they always got back to me in a timely manner. The biggest thing for us was that our portal was never down. That was not the case with our SharePoint 2013 migration, where we had to keep users offline for some time.”
Now, with Office 365 – SharePoint Online, the school’s students and users have access to the same sites and services they were using on premises – but IT no longer has to deal with the hassle of server maintenance. Thanks to AvePoint Client Services, the transition was seamless. “I don’t think we could have done the migration without external help,” Koch said. “Our only other option was to replace SharePoint, which would have been time consuming and costly. I cannot imagine what it would have cost to reproduce everything we did in SharePoint on other systems. Plus, users were already familiar with SharePoint, so it would have been a big undertaking to ask them to learn new systems and do the training.”