PHOENIX group IT Simplifies Microsoft SharePoint Management, Reporting, and Backup with DocAve
Success Highlights
Customer Location Mannheim, Germany
Industry Pharmaceuticals
Platform SharePoint 2010
Critical Needs
- Movement of content across SharePoint farms while retaining full fidelity
- Increased SharePoint reporting capabilities
- Flexible content backup and recovery
The Challenge
PHOENIX group IT uses SharePoint to enable collaboration for its large, geographically-dispersed user base. SharePoint provides the organization’s employees with a robust, centralized platform for document sharing, project collaboration, and tracking appointments.
One of these challenges was SharePoint backup. “We wanted to be able to manage SharePoint more easily than we could with native capabilities,” said a SharePoint administrator at PHOENIX group IT. “Because SharePoint does not allow data recovery at the item level, it was a lot of work, and took up too much time.”
Another challenge was SharePoint reporting. Admins wanted to be able to provide usage data to IT management and business stakeholders. PHOENIX group IT searched for a third-party solution that would enable them to expand its SharePoint management and reporting capabilities.
PHOENIX group IT
The AvePoint Solution
After evaluating several solutions, PHOENIX group IT ultimately implemented DocAve Software, AvePoint’s fully-integrated platform for SharePoint migration, management, and protection. “AvePoint’s solution was the best offering in terms of performance and support,” the administrator said. “DocAve has helped us go beyond PowerShell workarounds and SharePoint’s native capabilities for reporting, backup, and restructuring – which has saved us a lot of time.”
Before being able to take full advantage of SharePoint 2013, IT used DocAve Content Manager to look at its source and destination environments side by side and quickly identify legacy elements for propagation. “We didn’t necessarily want to move all of our legacy data to our new deployment,” the administrator said. “With DocAve, we are able to decide what content to copy or move as we go along. It is now much more convenient to granularly select items to copy or move between farms.”
With DocAve Content Manager, PHOENIX group’s IT team can also easily copy user permissions over to its new environment along with content. This ensures consistency across farms, and is crucial in maintaining a secure environment.
In terms of SharePoint reporting, IT wanted to be able to answer questions such as, “How many site collections are in the environment?” and “What permissions were modified last month?” With DocAve Report Center, PHOENIX group IT gains the ability to easily generate and export reports that give both IT and the business insight into how SharePoint is used.
DocAve also provides PHOENIX group IT’s team with an easy-to-use backup and recovery solution. With the ability to schedule automatic full and incremental backups, administrators spend significantly less time on manual processes. “SharePoint backup management is very easy with DocAve,” the administrator said. “I can also restore documents much faster than before. Now, it takes minutes. I am very happy with DocAve as it saves me a lot of time and allows me to work on other IT services.”
The Road Ahead
With DocAve, PHOENIX group’s IT team has gained additional functionality and flexibility in SharePoint restructuring, reporting, and backup – all of which are managed from a centralized platform. “DocAve has made organizing our new SharePoint environment much easier than it was in the past,” the administrator said. “DocAve allows us to selectively copy content from our legacy environment to the destination with full fidelity. When we have to retrieve content from a backup, it is also restored with all metadata intact. All of DocAve’s different functionalities can be managed from a centralized platform, which saves us a lot of time.”
