AvePoint Online Services gave me a wide range of Office 365 management solutions from one interface, which was an advantage.
As an IT consulting agency dedicated to delivering technology solutions for organizations looking to reduce expenses and enhance productivity, Kabesa frequently implements Microsoft Office 365 for clients to give them access to Microsoft’s reliable and innovative productivity solutions through the simplicity of the cloud. When one of the company’s clients – an engineering firm based in Montreal – was experiencing document management challenges, the organization called on Kabesa for its services and cloud expertise. “My client was generating large amounts of documents and had no standards for classification,” said Luc Labelle, owner of Kabesa. “They were losing time trying to find information, which was stored across file servers, FTPs, emails, Dropbox, external disks, and laptops.”
To resolve the issue, Kabesa recommended utilizing Office 365 – SharePoint Online. SharePoint Online met the client’s need for a centralized, fully searchable document repository, but also offered many added benefits as a collaboration platform. “The company also wanted to be able to allow their clients to access certain documents related to projects,” Labelle said. “Office 365 would enable us to easily create an extranet for their client portal without adding on premises infrastructure.”
As a part of the implementation, Kabesa created template site collections for its client’s projects. In order to provision the sites for all projects, Labelle needed the ability to replicate sites without having to recreate them from scratch each time. “Creating each new project site would have required at least two days of work with SharePoint Online’s out-of-the-box capabilities,” Labelle said.
In order to get his client up and running with SharePoint Online faster, Labelle sought a third-party software solution.
Kabesa implemented AvePoint Online Services (AOS) – a Microsoft Azure-hosted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for Office 365 management – for its client after testing the product. AOS simplifies administration and management of Office 365 with content, configuration, deployment and security management, and reporting capabilities. “AOS gave me a wide range of Office 365 management solutions from one interface, which was an advantage,” Labelle said.
AvePoint Online Services enabled Labelle to easily create project sites for the client by replicating the master template site across site collections as necessary. The tool enabled the sites to be replicated with all configurations intact – meaning Labelle did not need to recreate each new site individually. This yielded a 99 percent time savings for Kabesa. “With AvePoint Online Services, I could easily replicate site collections in about 20 minutes,” Labelle said. “When my engagement with the client is complete, the company employees will be able to use AOS to provision new project sites on their own.”
Kabesa also takes advantage of AOS' granular deployment capabilities, which enables Labelle to deploy select SharePoint Online objects and customizations to other locations in the client’s environment. “If I want to deploy a specific content type or setting from one site or site collection to another, AOS allows me to do that without having to deploy any of the content that I don’t need,” Labelle said.
AvePoint Online Services also provided Kabesa the ability to copy, move, migrate, and restructure SharePoint sites, content, and topology within or across SharePoint Online sites while preserving associated permissions and metadata. “AOS makes it very easy to move SharePoint Online content around while retaining important associated information,” Labelle said.
Throughout the client engagement, Kabesa was able to rely on AvePoint’s 24/7, global technical support team whenever it needed assistance. “AvePoint has a great support team,” Labelle said.
With Office 365, Kabesa’s client will be able to resolve its document management and enterprise search issues while taking advantage of improved collaboration capabilities for employees as well as clients. As it adopts the platform, the client will be able to rely on AvePoint Online Services to simplify management of its environment. “The client is very happy with the solution we offered,” Labelle said. “We were able to meet all of their business requirements through Office 365 and AOS without needing to write a single line of custom code.”
Kabesa is dedicated to helping small and medium businesses perform better by providing flexible, scalable, and – most importantly – affordable IT solutions.
AvePoint Online Services gave me a wide range of Office 365 management solutions from one interface, which was an advantage.