DocAve continues to offer us significant savings on an ongoing basis and ensures we don’t need to have as many staff members devoted to SharePoint administration.
In 2008, Transfreight implemented Microsoft SharePoint and rolled it out to the company as a part of a quality initiative in order to host collaborative team data and share company best practices for approximately 400 employees. In addition to creating a central environment where all employees could collaborate and store documents, the company utilized SharePoint’s workflow abilities to automate business approval processes around new employee recruitment and purchase requests.
While SharePoint quickly became an integral part of Transfreight’s daily operations and company culture, administrators faced challenges when attempting to move data between development, test, and production environments as well as manage security settings throughout the environment. “We found aspects of the SharePoint interface were not designed to help manage our environment quickly and easily,” said Wade Kuhl, Transfreight System Administrator. “Certain management tasks were quite onerous and time consuming.”
In order to simplify SharePoint management and save time, the administrators began to test third-party software solutions. One solution the administrators tested did not function well. “The first option we tried gave us frequent errors and content migration jobs continually failed,” Kuhl said. “The software’s interface, speed, and usability were less than desired.” Not at all content with this option, the administrators sought other solutions.
Ultimately, Transfreight chose AvePoint’s DocAve Software Platform. The administrators implemented DocAve Content Manager and DocAve Administrator, which are both a part of the fully integrated enterprise-class management platform for SharePoint governance. “We immediately found DocAve to be straightforward and easy to use for our SharePoint management needs,” Kuhl said. “Aspects such as the design – with a single interface for all products – as well as the ability to manage all of our SharePoint farms from one centralized location were integral to our decision to purchase DocAve.”
DocAve Content Manager enables organizations to comprehensively copy, move, migrate, and restructure SharePoint apps, content, sites, and topology within or across SharePoint environments in real time or on a schedule. When the administrators needed to deploy new team sites for 20 separate site collections as a part of a quality initiative, Kuhl was able to create the team sites in the development environment, copy them to the test environment, and then move them to the production environment with DocAve’s ribbon-based controls. After securing the sites with Active Directory, the project was completed within two business days and all data was moved with full fidelity. “DocAve’s tree structure and reliability allowed me to finish the job much quicker than I would have otherwise,” Kuhl said. “Without DocAve, I would have needed to carry out the project by writing PowerShell scripts, and the need to check the syntax for every site would have caused the project to take three times longer than it did.”
DocAve Administrator offers administrators increased efficiency and productivity with centralized search and management of SharePoint settings, configurations, and security across SharePoint environments. The product proved especially useful when the administrators needed to update security settings for all users throughout the entire environment. DocAve allows administrators to perform all SharePoint administrative functions in bulk and across multiple SharePoint environments at any object level. “DocAve allowed us to carry out all administration and security tasks from one location as well as fluidly navigate and update settings in bulk,” Kuhl said. “The project would have taken at least two months without DocAve, but we were able to complete it in only three weeks, saving a significant amount of man hours.”
Moving forward, DocAve’s abilities will continue to benefit Transfreight as the company relies upon SharePoint for its business operations and collaborative initiatives. Administrators use DocAve regularly to update and implement security settings for users and, at least once per month, developers create new content that needs to be moved between development, test, and production environments. “DocAve continues to offer us significant savings on an ongoing basis and ensures we don’t need to have as many staff members devoted to SharePoint administration,” Kuhl said. “I like the product because it helps me and it saves time.”
Transfreight is a premier third-party logistics (3PL) provider that engineers and executes unique lean supply chain solutions for each of its customers.
DocAve continues to offer us significant savings on an ongoing basis and ensures we don’t need to have as many staff members devoted to SharePoint administration.