Marquardt Automates Microsoft® SharePoint® Provisioning and Permissions Management with DocAve® Governance Automation
Success Highlights
Customer Location Rietheim-Weilheim, Germany
Industry Industrial
Platform SharePoint 2013
Critical Needs
- Reduce IT effort required to deploy new site collections per users’ requests
- Automatically archive and recertify properties for site collections and sites
- Flexible backup and granular restore of SharePoint content
The Challenge
As a large international enterprise, Marquardt relies on SharePoint for collaboration among its 5,000 users. Those users work together on projects and documents, which generates a large amount of data. To prevent sprawl, the organization implemented strict policies that prevent users from creating unlimited sites, lists, and libraries that may not be in line with corporate governance policies or branding. Since users did not have permission to create these themselves, they relied heavily on IT to do the provisioning. “We wanted a way to minimize the amount of effort it would take on the IT side to administer SharePoint,” said Rolf Engesser, Program Lead Enterprise Workplace at Marquardt. “So, we searched for a solution that would help us save time by automating standard requests such as deploying a new site collection, granting access, or creating subsites.”
The organization’s IT team planned on creating templates for project site collections to be commonly used throughout SharePoint. “We knew there had to be a solution that would allow us to automate and standardize this process,” Engesser said. “We want to avoid spending a significant amount of time setting up new sites and site collections.”
In order to save time and effort managing SharePoint, Marquardt administrators sought a third-party solution.
Program Lead Enterprise Workplace, Marquardt
The AvePoint Solution
To help its IT department become more efficient, the organization implemented DocAve Governance Automation, AvePoint’s solution for SharePoint governance, along with additional DocAve Software solutions for infrastructure management. With DocAve Governance Automation, Marquardt provides users easy access to a pre-approved catalog of standard services – reducing the burden on IT and ensuring company policies are followed. “With DocAve Governance Automation, we were able to automate a lot of our daily IT tasks,” Engesser said. “We avoided the large amount of manual work on our plate, which helped us save a lot of time.”
Since IT predefines services available through DocAve Governance Automation – such as setting up lists, libraries, and workflows – administrators never worry about users provisioning anything out of policy. When a user requests a new site collection via DocAve Governance Automation, DocAve Deployment Manager – which automates the deployment of SharePoint artifacts – copies the template from a staging environment and creates a site collection in production. “We felt that the SharePoint provisioning capabilities out of the box were not sufficient for our needs,” Engesser said. “We have several hundred site collections – and growing – for projects, teams, and groups. With DocAve Governance Automation, we allow users to request pre-approved site collections from templates we create, and our team only has to handle special requests manually.”
Giving users easy access to IT resources significantly reduces the burden on IT to manage SharePoint on a daily basis. With several hundred site collections in SharePoint, manually assigning permissions for specific sites would be extremely time-consuming. “With DocAve Governance Automation, we can automate these changes,” Engesser said. “There is no need to go to each site collection to make changes. Our self-service portal allows users to request permissions, and automatically apply those changes.”
Provisioning isn’t the only data lifecycle stage where DocAve helps IT – administrators also automatically retain site collections based on different policies. “By default, we retain everything for one year,” Engesser said. “However, we apply different rules for different content. As a company in the automotive industry, we are subject to stringent compliance audits.”
DocAve Governance Automation also allows IT to recertify SharePoint properties such as ownership and permissions to ensure they are always up to date. “We schedule our permissions recertification to occur every six months,” Engesser said. “For us, that is a good frequency to check that content owners and access are correct.”
Because DocAve is a fully integrated platform, IT can manage SharePoint backup from the same solution and user-friendly interface. To go beyond SharePoint’s native data protection capabilities, Marquardt uses DocAve Backup and Restore to schedule automatic platform backups daily and incremental backups hourly. “With DocAve, it is very easy to manage our backups,” Engesser said. “What’s more, we can now restore content at the item level. If a user needs me to recover a file they accidentally deleted, it takes as little as 10 minutes.”
The Road Ahead
With DocAve Governance Automation and DocAve Software, Marquardt enhances its ability to manage its SharePoint content throughout the complete data lifecycle. Instead of spending hours manually responding to requests for new sites and site collections, IT provides users with a pre-defined catalog of services that can be automated – saving IT hours of time doing this manually. IT can now also automatically recertify permissions and retain or archive content based on custom policies. “DocAve Governance Automation helps us automate most of our SharePoint management tasks,” Engesser said. “Because of this, we can put more of our efforts toward specialized cases.”
