Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society Dramatically Reduces SharePoint Management Tasks

Critical Needs

  • Central interface for managing SharePoint permissions
  • Quick and simple SharePoint site provisioning
  • Simple solution for copying SharePoint sites

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  • Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society
  • Customer Location Arlington, VA, USA
  • Industry Not-for-profit
  • Platform SharePoint 2013
  • AvePoint SolutionsDocAve

Success Highlights

  • Reduced management steps for configuring sites by half
  • Ability to easily create or rename SharePoint sites, copy content
  • Quick implementation of new SharePoint team site features
quote Being able to make a list of sites to be configured, import those into a queue, and execute all at once cut our process in half and made my life so much easier. quote
Martha Bowen Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, Training Development Specialist, Learning Management System

Customer Profile

The Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society (NMCRS) provides financial assistance and education, as well as other programs and services, to members of the United States Navy and Marine Corps, their eligible family members, widows and survivors. The Society also receives and manages donated funds to administer these programs and services.

The Challenge

NMCRS has been leveraging an on-premise environment since the debut of SharePoint 2013. Initially intended to serve simply as the organization’s intranet, the environment has since been built out to incorporate internal data storage and an extensive Learning Management System.

SharePoint has proven to be an essential knowledge management solution for their constantly changing user base. While NMCRS has about 250 staff members, their environment is also accessed by approximately 1,500 to 3,000 volunteers that turnover more frequently. This created permission management challenges.

NMCRS was also looking for a way to provision and manage SharePoint sites more effectively. Specifically, they needed a way to build out Project sites and roll out new features across Team sites.

The AvePoint Solution

To address its need to constantly adjust permissions across its large volunteer pool, NMCRS decided to leverage DocAve Administrator as a central interface to set temporary permissions which streamlined the repetitive task.

“Out of the box SharePoint has some great tools that you can use to manage your environment, but you really need an additional solution when it comes to managing all of the permissions or to quickly provision sites,” said Thelisha Woods, Director of Internal Communications and Publications at NMCRS.

NMCRS also faced challenges scaling their process for provisioning new project sites which included copying the templates of existing sites. DocAve Deployment Manager helped them hurdle this obstacle.

“Being able to easily copy old sites and build on them ensured we could leverage SharePoint for ALL of our business needs rather than having to find an alternative,” said Woods.

DocAve also allowed NMCRS to take full advantage of new features in Team sites for their Learning Management System. Using DocAve, the new tools within the LMS – to facilitate training coordination and mentoring of volunteers – was able to be seamlessly deployed. In order to take advantage of the new features, over 150 Team sites would need to be configured and standardized.

What would have been a lengthy, complex and cumbersome process was dramatically simplified with the help of DocAve and the AvePoint Customer Success team.

“Through working with Customer Success, we were able to cut those management steps in half. We were able to configure the existing 100 sites, roll out an additional 50, and we staged an additional 30,“ said Martha Bowen, Training Development Specialist of the Learning Management System at NMCRS. “Being able to make a list of sites to be configured, import those into a queue and execute those all at once made my life so much easier.”

The Customer Success team was also able to help NMCRS take full advantage of all of DocAve’s extensive features and solution modules including Backup & Recovery, Connector, Report Center and more.

“Customer Success was a key driver in helping us get past our internal issues with copying sites and moving content and get the full value from DocAve,” said Woods.

The Bottom Line

NMCRS’ permission management, site copying, and site provisioning tasks have become much more efficient through the use of DocAve.

The solution has also enabled them to take full advantage of Team sites and take their Learning Management System to the next level.

Finally, NMCRS has gained comfort with their existing environment and has begun exploring the idea of migrating into SharePoint Online.

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