The AvePoint Solution

Following a recommendation from IT services company Amexus Informationstechnik, Westlotto evaluated and ultimately implemented DocAve Software, AvePoint’s fully integrated platform for SharePoint management. “In our selection process, DocAve was especially appealing because we saw that we could manage multiple parts of SharePoint from one platform,” Engeln said. “DocAve is a very good, reliable solution for our needs.”

The biggest of those needs was SharePoint backup and restore. With DocAve, Westlotto’s IT admins can create a more flexible backup strategy. Once they implemented DocAve, they scheduled automatic backup jobs, running full backups daily and incremental backups every hour to meet compliance policies. “It is very easy to set up our automatic backup jobs,” Engeln said. “We’ve also set up retention policies with DocAve so that our backups are stored for 90 days then deleted. I don’t ever have to think about manually running scripts or backups taking up too much space because it’s all been automated.”

Having set up an automatic backup schedule that works for its needs, IT also now has the ability to perform granular restores from those backups. Where SharePoint out of the box only allows data recovery at the content database level, DocAve allows admins to restore at the item level – while retaining all metadata. “I was once working on a survey project when a web part became corrupted,” Engeln said. “Because we had DocAve, I was able to restore it from a backup taken a few hours prior, which only took five minutes. Thanks to DocAve, I only had to rebuild two questions instead of the entire survey. If I didn’t have DocAve, it would have taken more than a day to fix, and it would have been a much lengthier process.”

Another area where Westlotto saw improvement was content management and movement within SharePoint. As IT developed more workflows to replace paper processes and forms, the team desired a solution that would allow them to move content from testing to production more quickly. “To make it easier for our users to request services or equipment, we created flows in a test environment,” Engeln said. “With DocAve, we can very easily and smoothly move content from one environment to the other. Because DocAve allows us to move and copy content with full fidelity, we are confident that all of our work gets moved to production and employees can take advantage of the new workflows. For example, we can onboard new employees with the correct SharePoint permissions without human resources needing to rely on developer support. That team was able to quickly take advantage of that workflow and save time doing their jobs.”

As a fully integrated software platform, DocAve allows Westlotto’s administrators to manage SharePoint backup and content management from a central place – no need to implement and learn multiple tools. “It’s great to have multiple functionalities in a single platform,” Engeln said. “We have one license key and one point of contact for everything. It’s really an all-in-one package.”