Zedi Restores Microsoft® SharePoint® Data 98% Faster and Saves One Month Migrating to SharePoint 2010 with DocAve®
Success Highlights
Customer Location Calgary, Alberta
Industry Energy/Utilities
Platform SharePoint 2010
Critical Needs
- Swift, full-fidelity restoration of deleted SharePoint content for end users
- Simplified migration of SharePoint content while retaining data’s full fidelity
The Challenge
Zedi has been utilizing SharePoint since Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2.0. Since then, the company has relied upon the platform primarily for document management and enterprise search for approximately 500 knowledge workers. However, the company recently began to explore other areas where SharePoint can deliver value to the business. Zedi is now using SharePoint to help report on external business data, and the company’s performance review program is run on the platform using Microsoft InfoPath forms.
With years of important content stored in SharePoint and use of the platform growing rapidly, Zedi Network Administrator Dean Greenhorn came to realize that SharePoint’s native data protection abilities were no longer sufficient for the company’s needs. “Even using STSADM Command Line, I was not able to restore content at a granular level, and I was not able to ensure that important information like date stamps or revision history for lost content would be recovered,” Greenhorn said. “I would often have to restore the entire content database to our development farm and then migrate the data to where it belongs, but this process took at least one hour.”
With the critical needs of granular data protection and swift restoration, Greenhorn searched for a third-party software solution.
Network Administrator, Zedi
The AvePoint Solution
Lightning Fast Data Recovery
Zedi’s data protection needs were fulfilled by DocAve Backup and Restore — part of the DocAve Software Platform from AvePoint. In addition to providing true enterprise-level backup of Zedi’s SharePoint environment, DocAve allowed Greenhorn to quickly and easily recover all SharePoint components, databases, indexes, and configurations. DocAve’s granular restore capabilities enabled deft, full-fidelity recovery of Zedi’s important documents, sites, or subsites directly to the original media during standard hours of operation. “DocAve does a great job of preserving important information with recovered SharePoint content and gives me confidence that nothing is lost,” Greenhorn said. “Recovering content with DocAve, whether it is the farm level or item level, is quick and painless.”
Greenhorn also learned of the other fully integrated solutions available through the DocAve Software Platform. “I fell in love with DocAve, and from there learned much more about its capabilities,” Greenhorn said. This lead Greenhorn to implement additional DocAve solutions for Zedi’s deployment.
Simplified Migration to SharePoint 2010
To utilize advances in workflows and InfoPath solutions, Zedi decided to upgrade from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. Greenhorn initially planned to carry out the migration using the database reattach method, but learned that DocAve Migrator could simplify the job significantly. DocAve Migrator enables full-fidelity content migration at the item, site, or site collection level from previous versions of SharePoint according to company’s specific business needs. Though they can be scheduled, Greenhorn opted to perform migration jobs live with DocAve for Zedi’s 50 GB of SharePoint content. “I migrated sites from our MOSS 2007 production environment to our development environment,” Greenhorn said. “I then asked users to validate that their site is working properly, and with their approval I could migrate the data to the SharePoint 2010 production environment any time during the day with the use of Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) redirection.”
With an environment full of customizations and web parts, the database reattach method required Greenhorn to read through logs when migration jobs did not complete properly. DocAve’s Pre-Migration Scanner alerted Greenhorn of any issues so problems could be resolved quickly and efficiently.
Greenhorn was also able to rearrange and clean up content upon migration with DocAve’s flexible deployment capabilities to optimize the company’s environment on SharePoint 2010. “Migrating via database reattach, I estimated I would have needed an extra month to migrate complex sites with lots of customizations, but DocAve migrated complex sites just as easily as the simple ones,” Greenhorn said. “If solutions were missing, I could easily install them on the new farm and re-initiate a part of my existing DocAve plan. DocAve also gave me the flexibility to redesign our farm according to company needs upon migration.”
The Road Ahead
Now on SharePoint 2010 with data sufficiently protected, Greenhorn plans on taking advantage of even more DocAve solutions at Zedi, including DocAve Content Manager and DocAve Administrator. “With DocAve Content Manager, I will be able to re-organize site content however I want with minimal effort,” Greenhorn said.
