DocAve saved us significant time and effort in our SharePoint migration.
The MTC organization has long utilized SharePoint to provide a central home for its documentation and partner-related information, as well as a portal for team-wide collaboration. After the release of SharePoint 2010, the MTC sought to migrate its content and data from its SharePoint 2007 environment to a Microsoft IT (MSIT) hosted instance of SharePoint 2010. Quickly, the migration team at the MTC knew that they could not migrate the data stored in SharePoint 2007 directly to this environment due to restrictions on custom applications in the hosted service.
Using native Microsoft technology, the migration team would conduct a database upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to a staging SharePoint 2010 environment, and manually upload data from SharePoint 2010 onto the MSIT cloud. However, many customizations and metadata would be lost in the transfer from the SharePoint 2010 staging farm to MSIT’s hosted SharePoint 2010 instance. Recreating metadata and repopulating custom lists from scratch would be extremely time consuming and resource intensive for the migration team, and potentially disrupt business productivity at the MTCs worldwide.
In order to quickly migrate to MSIT while maintaining its current metadata and customizations without harming business continuity, MTC began its search for a third-party migration solution.
After researching several third-party solutions, MTC selected AvePoint’s DocAve Migrator for SharePoint tool. In addition to DocAve Migrator’s feature set, including full-fidelity content and data migration as well as flexible job scheduling, the fact that DocAve Migrator enabled MTC to create and reuse migration jobs assured MTC they could confidently reduce the impact on day-to-day business.
“Our mission at MTC is to serve organizations seeking to achieve their business goals using Microsoft and partner technologies,” said Chuck McCann, Worldwide MTC Alliances Program Director for Microsoft. “AvePoint’s DocAve Migrator tool would best help us make the vital move to our internally hosted, cloudbased SharePoint 2010 instance quickly and efficiently, without distracting us from our mission.”
The MTCs immediately put DocAve to work. After setting up a SharePoint 2010 staging farm, the migration team first performed an initial migration of its data from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. After the migration to the SharePoint 2010 staging farm, DocAve job reports gave the team a clear view into the data available for migration, which included approximately 12,000 site collections and 26 gigabytes of content, and proactively create an action plan for migrating the necessary content into the hosted environment.
DocAve’s flexibility to either migrate the data granularly or in bulk gave the MTCs the ability to create migration jobs that met their specific business needs. While there were approximately 12,000 site collections in the MTC’s SharePoint 2007 environment, it was allocated one site collection. Among the data set for migration, there were approximately 200 custom-built lists. Without DocAve, MTC administrators would have had to manually recreate the lists in the new environment – including all the metadata, customizations, columns, and field values – from scratch.
“DocAve’s automated migration job scheduler ensured our administrator could confidently run migrations faster, and without disrupting ongoing business.”
-Chuck McCann – Worldwide MTC Alliances Program Director, Microsoft
The migration team was able to create automated migration jobs to run at times that would not disrupt day-to-day business. For example, The MTCs set up jobs to begin running Friday evening and then continue throughout weekends, saving time and manual effort for administrators to literally stay in MTC offices in New York to start migration jobs. DocAve’s web-based interface provided administrators the ability to monitor migration job status periodically from wherever they were located. “Giving the administrators the peace of mind to know they could check in on migration jobs from anywhere they had an internet connection because of DocAve was tremendous,” said Toby Tobescu, Senior Technology Specialist at Microsoft.
With DocAve, the MTCs shaved two months off of its total migration time to MSIT, which only took six weeks with DocAve. By performing automated migration jobs off-hours without forcing administrators to manually commence projects and constantly monitor them from the office, they could ensure other technology investments continued working properly and maintain business continuity.
Furthermore, the metadata, securities, permissions, structure, and other customizations for its 12,000 site collections and approximately 200 lists were maintained throughout the entire migration to the MSIT environment. This not only saved administrators time and limited human error in manual upload and recreation, it also prevented any business disruption for other MTC employees relying upon the data to perform their daily business tasks.
“I can proudly say AvePoint’s DocAve Migrator saved us significant time and effort in our migration to MSIT,” McCann said. “Not only did it vastly improve the productivity of our IT administrators, it allowed our business to continue focusing on servicing our customers using Microsoft to solve their technical challenges.”
Microsoft Technology Centers (MTCs) provide organizations access to experts to help envision, design, and demonstrate solutions utilizing Microsoft and partner technologies to meet their specific business needs. There are 11 MTC locations throughout the United States, and an additional 12 locations worldwide.
DocAve saved us significant time and effort in our SharePoint migration.