How Antarctica New Zealand Stays Productive with SharePoint and AvePoint DocAve Replicator
Success Highlights
Customer Location Christchurch, New Zealand Scott Base, Antarctica
Industry Environmental
Platform SharePoint 2010,SharePoint 2013,SharePoint 2016
Critical Needs
- Harness limited bandwidth
- Compress and filter data
- Replicate data between NZ and Antarctica offices
The Challenge
With a very low 2Mbps of bandwidth available via satellite for Scott Base’s 30+ users and 45+ end-users at their Christchurch office, Antarctica New Zealand required a third-party solution to harness and maximise their limited access.
With 333 GB of SQL data, Antarctica New Zealand staff members use their SharePoint environment ‘Discovery’ as a combined document and management system, an ERDMS as well as an intranet, to conduct their jobs daily.
“We capture metadata and information about the records that our staff creates and then use it to ensure things are accessible, managed well, and only retained for as long as needed”, said Antarctica New Zealand’s Information and Records Manager, Anita Kerr. “High level records are protected from deletion. SharePoint holds our day to day working documents, templates, and records for our key business functions.”
Without using a third-party replicator tool, Antarctica New Zealand SharePoint users wouldn’t be able to access information quickly and the data connection would crawl while trying to log into the Christchurch, New Zealand server from Antarctica.
Previously, without replication, Antarctica New Zealand’s staff were fighting slow download times, or using documents offline that were out of date, duplicated and/or non-authoritative.
Antarctica New Zealand found their previous replicator tool, that they used for about four years, to be quite time cumbersome and only useable by IT experts. Replication errors seemed to occur daily, and their sole systems engineer found it difficult to stay on top of and resolve the errors.
Additionally, the tool’s support team was in the northern hemisphere, meaning limited hours of direct contact which lead to Antarctica New Zealand’s system engineer having to stay up late in order to access direct phone support.
They needed a better solution.
Information and Records Manager Antarctica New Zealand
The AvePoint Solution
“With AvePoint’s DocAve Replicator, our users can download and sync in real-time. We use systems to compress data, filter data, and in this case, replicate business data back and forth between our two offices,” said Anita.
“With the AvePoint tool, everything has been perfect. Around the time we implemented the tool, our systems engineer resigned, and since Antarctica New Zealand is a small company, no one knew how to use our newly acquired AvePoint tool. However, I picked it up and ran with it and found that the tool was easy enough for a non-IT expert to set up and use. The tool has been really successful,” said Anita.
With AvePoint Replicator, Antarctica New Zealand also made a change to replicate everything rather than ‘some things’ which they have found to make a huge difference with document integrity and time-savings. This change allows users in both Christchurch and Scott Base to have access to the exact material needed, reliably, in real-time.
The Road Ahead
“We have certainly saved a lot of time. Managing our previous replication tool seemed like an almost full-time job, with errors making the system broken in areas and a backlog of fixes required, there was never enough time to solve these issues which lead to long hours spent attempting to resolving them,” said Anita.
“The use of the AvePoint tool is almost seamless, we can go a few weeks without an issue – which was unheard of in our old environment. We really don’t have to do anything with
the tool unless there is an alert from AvePoint, and it is always easy to iron out any issues.”
When it came to AvePoint’s technical support group, Antarctica New Zealand found the support to be fast, supportive, and with comprehensive follow up.
“The support team is brilliant. We have generally had very fast, polite and supportive responses. It’s great that the team can log into my screen and walk me through changes so that it is easy to see what they are doing, while I can learn from it and ensure that the changes are accurate,” said Anita. Antarctica New Zealand found the double-paneled interface within the support portal to be easy to use as well, with simple navigation and symbols to show how to make connections and update plans, with the accessibility of 24hour support.
In the future, Antarctica New Zealand looks forward to taking a deeper dive into AvePoint products that could help improve their workflow and business transactions.