DocAve’s intuitive interface plays an important role in making our jobs as SharePoint administrators much easier.
A leader in its industry with facilities throughout Germany, Europoles relies on SharePoint as a system to collaborate on documents as well as provide important information to more than 1300 employees. “At our organization, SharePoint is the place to store and find information,” said Thomas Schmidt, IT System Administrator at Europoles. “In addition to document management and sharing company news through our intranet, we utilize SharePoint’s workflow functionality for ongoing internal activities like paid time off and business card requests.”
Since the system was relied on by employees across the organization, Europoles needed to ensure it was on the latest version of SharePoint supported by Microsoft. After SharePoint 2013 was released, the organization decided to migrate its data to the new version from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. In addition to being supported by Microsoft, the company would also be able to access the platform’s latest features for social collaboration. However, carrying out the migration would not be easy without the right tool in place, as Microsoft offered no native functionality to move content from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2013.
Another challenge Europoles encountered was SharePoint’s out-of-the-box data protection capabilities. The platform’s inability to easily restore lost, corrupted, or accidentally deleted content down to the item level was problematic from both a user and IT perspective, as restoring content was too resource intensive. “To restore individual items, we had to create a new SharePoint server, save the backed up data to it, and then restore the item,” Schmidt said. “We always tried to avoid doing this because it required too much time and effort.”
Europoles began to search for a solution that could better migrate and protect its SharePoint data.
Europoles ultimately decided to implement the DocAve Software – AvePoint’s enterprise-class management platform for SharePoint. Through DocAve’s centralized interface, Europoles was able to not only satisfy its migration and protection needs, but also carry out management tasks to make IT more efficient. “DocAve offered us SharePoint management capabilities that would not have been possible with native functionality.”
With DocAve in place, first on Europoles’ list was its SharePoint migration. DocAve enables organizations to carry out a direct migration to the latest versions of SharePoint from previous versions of the platform as well as other legacy systems. Europoles was able to migrate 190 GB of its content directly to SharePoint 2013 without losing any data in the process – since DocAve enables full-fidelity migration of SharePoint content, retaining metadata, version history, permissions, and security settings.
To meet Europoles’ SharePoint protection needs, DocAve Backup and Restore enabled fast, full-fidelity backup and recovery from individual content items to the entire environment. Europoles administrators were able to set automated backup plans according to organizational needs. “We run automated content backups on a daily basis at noon and 6pm,” Schmidt said. “We also run a full database backup outside of business hours every Saturday at 4pm.”
Europoles was also able to rely on DocAve to satisfy its challenges restoring items for end users. The IT team no longer has to carry out a lengthy process to recover content for users. With DocAve’s granular restore capabilities, Europoles can now selectively recover individual files, entire farms, or a combination of farm components with less downtime. “Restoring data is no longer an issue for us,” Schmidt said. “Thanks to DocAve, we can now easily and seamlessly restore any individual document for a user – typically taking only 10 minutes at a maximum.”
Beyond migration and protection, DocAve also gave Europoles significant new SharePoint management capabilities. DocAve Content Manager enables the organization to simplify the process of moving content within SharePoint with the tool’s ability to comprehensively move, copy, and restructure without interrupting business processes. “We can now move single libraries and sites efficiently,” Schmidt said. “DocAve’s intuitive interface plays an important role in making our jobs as SharePoint administrators much easier.”
As they began to rely on DocAve, whenever administrators had a question, AvePoint’s global, 24/7 support team was always there to help. “AvePoint’s technical support is always fast and friendly,” Schmidt said. “They have solved any issues we’ve encountered immediately and suggested solutions that led to positive results.”
As SharePoint continues to grow, evolve, and act as a critical system to the business, Europoles will utilize DocAve to help manage and protect the platform. “We are currently building out our roadmap for the future of SharePoint at our organization,” Schmidt said. “No matter what the future looks like, one thing we are sure of is that we will rely on DocAve along the way.”
Europoles is Europe’s leading manufacturer of masts, columns, and structural systems.
DocAve’s intuitive interface plays an important role in making our jobs as SharePoint administrators much easier.