After evaluating multiple solutions, I determined AvePoint offered the best quality product.
The City of Bloomington has utilized Microsoft SharePoint for a decade. The city chose to implement SharePoint over several other content management systems. “The functionality SharePoint offered was beyond anything else available,” said Craig McBeath, Webmaster at City of Bloomington.
In addition to taking advantage of the platform’s powerful collaboration abilities, the city uses SharePoint to run a variety of specific departmental applications. For instance, the city’s police department utilizes SharePoint for data collection and analysis. “With Microsoft InfoPath form services in SharePoint, we are able to capture data from mobile terminals in vehicles so police officers can submit information from their cars directly into SharePoint,” McBeath said.
When Microsoft SharePoint 2010 was released, the city decided to migrate its Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 environment to the new version of the platform. “It was clear that SharePoint 2010 was a much more mature product than MOSS 2007,” McBeath said. “It had a tighter integration with SharePoint Designer and Microsoft Visual Studio as well as easier permissions management for end users. It also offered new InfoPath features which would benefit our police department’s use of the platform.”
Migrating data with full fidelity was of utmost importance to the city. “Retaining metadata was critical for our organization,” McBeath said. “All of the data collected by our police department is court admissible, so we could not lose or change any information about when forms and documents were created and modified.” Since a full-fidelity migration was not guaranteed by migrating using SharePoint’s native abilities, the city researched third-party software solutions.
McBeath researched and viewed demos of solutions from several vendors and selected AvePoint’s DocAve Migrator, part of the DocAve Software Platform. “After evaluating multiple solutions, I determined AvePoint offered the best quality product,” McBeath said. “The fact that DocAve Migrator was part of a fully-integrated platform was also important, as I can easily add additional tools to help with other aspects of platform management in the future without the need to install another product or server.”
DocAve helped save significant time with its ability to perform a live migration with drag-and-drop ease. “I initially planned for the migration to take five business days, but it only took one with DocAve,” McBeath said. “I was able to migrate our approximately 1 GB of data in less than six hours, before I left work for the evening. I appreciated the fact that, after migration jobs were carried out, I was able to easily go back and migrate all newly-created data that was not carried over in the previous job.”
Most importantly, DocAve migrated all data with full fidelity, including metadata, permissions, and document properties, just as the city required in order to remain compliant with the court system. “The day after I migrated our data to the new environment, I had our criminal intelligence and analysis unit look at the new environment to make sure all metadata was the same,” McBeath said. “They quickly determined that it was, and we were then able to begin using SharePoint 2010.”
With DocAve, the city was able to meet its chief requirement of retaining the full fidelity of its data upon migration. Additionally, DocAve enabled the city to simplify its migration process and begin leveraging SharePoint 2010’s enhanced features even sooner than expected. “DocAve was one of the easiest pieces of software I’ve ever installed and used,” McBeath said. “It’s intuitive, easy to find exactly what you need, and doesn’t require hours of your time to understand.”
The City of Bloomington is located in the heart of Central Illinois, approximately 125 miles southwest of Chicago, 155 miles northeast of St. Louis, and 64 miles northeast of Springfield, the State Capital. Bloomington is the County Seat of McLean County, the largest county in Illinois. With a population of approximately 76,700, Bloomington is a twin city with the Town of Normal.
After evaluating multiple solutions, I determined AvePoint offered the best quality product.