Mint Management Technologies Conducts Fast, Full-Fidelity Migration to Microsoft Office 365 with DocAve
Success Highlights
Customer Location South Africa
Industry Technology
Platform Microsoft 365, SharePoint 2013
Critical Needs
- Retain all metadata during migration
- Flexible migration capabilities
- Optimize SharePoint Online storage by only migrating essential content to the new platform
The Challenge
To reduce the burden of managing the hardware required to run its on-premises SharePoint 2013 environment, and to take advantage of Microsoft collaboration and productivity offerings such as Delve and SharePoint Online, Mint decided to migrate to Office 365. In addition to securing a solution that involved less in-house IT maintenance, the organization also saw value in a cloud-based platform that enabled easy access to content for mobile users.
In the process of planning its move to Office 365, Mint identified some challenges in migrating its business critical content using only native capabilities. “We wanted to protect the integrity of our content during migration,” said Francois Pienaar, ECM Director at Mint. “Without a third-party solution, we were not able to maintain permission structure and other metadata. We also wanted the ability to cut down on storage and migrate only the three most recent versions of any file. For example, one of our files was larger than 3.5 gigabytes (GB) in size due to version history.”
SharePoint was a critical application for the organization’s daily operations – including internal communications, document storage and sharing, collaboration on sales proposals, and employee engagement. To minimize disruption during the migration, Mint required an enterprise-level, third-party solution for Office 365 migration that minimizes downtime, allows for flexible migration, optimizes storage, and retains all content metadata.
ECM Director, Mint Management Technologies
The AvePoint Solution
After evaluating several solutions, Mint ultimately implemented DocAve Software, AvePoint’s enterprise-class infrastructure management platform for SharePoint. “Although we tried other solutions, DocAve had full auditability, the ability to transfer data with full fidelity, and enterprise-ready capabilities that the others didn’t,” Pienaar said. “The platform is comprehensive in its ability to manage and protect SharePoint.”
Mint used DocAve Deployment Manager to deploy all content types and customizations from its SharePoint 2013 environment to SharePoint Online as well as understand any incompatibilities between the two platforms. This helped ensure consistency between its legacy environment and the destination before moving any content into the cloud. “We were able to easily deploy our base structure from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365,” Pienaar said. “DocAve allowed us to granularly select and deploy only the customizations and content types we needed from our on-premises environment.”
Once the SharePoint Online environment was ready, Mint ultimately used DocAve Content Manager to easily move its content directly from SharePoint 2013 to the cloud. With DocAve, Mint was able to execute test jobs and review audit logs before scheduling migration jobs. The ability to preview jobs and produce reports on the status of each migration job allowed Mint’s IT team to keep the business apprised on the overall progress of the project.
DocAve’s flexibility enabled Mint to restructure its new SharePoint Online environment to ensure it was optimized for the business. “With SharePoint Online and Azure’s native capabilities, you must import and export to restructure content – which is a time-consuming process,” Pienaar said. “DocAve gives us much more flexibility in being able to move things around as we go along and re-use mapping configurations for future jobs. That saved us time, and we protected the integrity of all of our content in the process.”
Another benefit provided by DocAve was its ability to selectively move content according to Mint’s specific needs. “With DocAve, we were able to move only the last three versions of all documents across the environment and bring storage down to 35 GB from 50 GB,” Pienaar said. “This was important for us in optimizing SharePoint Online as a central repository for organizational documentation and reducing the overall amount of content we migrated to the new environment.”
The Road Ahead
With DocAve, Mint was able to conduct a flexible, full-fidelity migration in one month and quickly begin using the latest tools and features in Office 365. “Because DocAve is an enterprise-class solution, we experienced zero downtime throughout the process,” Pienaar said. “Through testing, we were able to determine how long it would take to migrate data sets and create an accurate project timetable. For an enterprise, the ability to forecast when the migration would end is imperative.”
In addition to testing capabilities, Pienaar found other features highly beneficial. “I appreciated being able to restructure content on the fly as well as DocAve’s detailed reporting and full rollback capabilities,” Pienaar said. “DocAve was really at the core of our SharePoint Online migration, and we appreciated help from AvePoint’s technical support team throughout the process.”