As such, many organisations are adopting Microsoft SharePoint for its benefits as an enterprise content management and collaboration platform, breaking down silos among traditional lines of business including sales, marketing, human resources, and legal. While SharePoint provides a canvas for businesses to paint their own picture of success, it is vital that the platform is managed and protected in a way that enables business productivity while saving time and lowering total cost of ownership. With a wide range of available third-party solutions for the management and governance of SharePoint, it is crucial for businesses to look for tools that increase user adoption, save time and lower the total cost of ownership to get the most out of their investment in the platform.
Migration to SharePoint 2010 Leads to Rapid User Adoption & Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Alegri International Group, a leading IT consultancy with a focus on Microsoft technologies based in Germany, was already utilising Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 for both its company intranet as well as its external website presence. Looking to migrate to SharePoint 2010 to take advantage of new features which would vastly improve a great deal of Alegri’s SharePoint-based internal processes, the company had reservations regarding the potential loss of customisations as well as business productivity. Alegri turned to AvePoint to conduct a migration that not only allowed for the purging of antiquated documentation, but also automated the process so that it could occur outside of business hours and thus limit the potential for business disruption. Alegri was able to reduce its migration time to SharePoint 2010 by five months, while securely transferring more than 100 gigabytes of data to SharePoint 2010 maintaining all of its customisations, metadata, and field values.
Not just limited to the technology sector, Kingston University was looking for a migration from SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003 directly to SharePoint 2010 in order to take advantage of its updated social collaboration and mobile features for students – including blogs, wikis, communities, discussion boards, and tagging. Using Microsoft’s native migration functions, the University would have to perform a two-part migration, first to MOSS 2007 and then to SharePoint 2010, costing the University a tremendous amount of time and resources. Again, by utilising third-party tools provided by AvePoint, the University was able to migrate directly to SharePoint 2010, reducing the project time by three months and saving £20,000. This allowed the University to reduce the time to value for the technology implementation while also lowering total cost of ownership, two tenets that are vital in the higher education industry.
Another feature often overlooked when migrating to a new platform such as SharePoint 2010 is having a fresh start structuring and organising data to meet specific business requirements. When North American Construction Group first deployed MOSS 2007, it had structured its environment in a way that was not conducive to its employees collaborating properly to complete their projects. Looking to fix this by migrating to SharePoint 2010, the company realised that it could not both move and restructure during the migration using SharePoint’s native features. By using third-party software, North American Construction Group was not only able to restructure content in a manner that helped enable greater business productivity among its distributed team, it was also able to save $100,000 on the migration process, negating the need for an external consultant.
SharePoint Management and Data Protection Leads to Tremendous Time Savings & Minimal Business Disruption
Many organisations migrate to SharePoint 2010 to provide a platform for enterprise-wide collaboration and management of content. However, more work must be done to ensure that the environment is managed properly and also protects data in a way that does not lead to overburdened IT administrators and business disruption.
In the case of FHI 360, a global development organisation, it completed an acquisition that doubled the number of SharePoint end-users from 2,500 to nearly 5,000. Being able to manage this immense spike in user adoption was vital to ensure business continuity throughout the acquisition period. With the influx in users, FHI 360 was worried that documents would be deleted by accident as end-users became acquainted to the new environment. Native SharePoint functionality would force administrators to restore an entire database just to recover one document, taking down the live SharePoint environment for four days and causing large-scale disruption to the business. By extending SharePoint’s capabilities, FHI 360 was able to skip this method and restore individual documents in 15 minutes.
Not only limited to protecting data, Lauren, a United States-based construction services organisation, enjoyed fantastic adoption of its SharePoint environment. However, with no way to report or track permissions and security settings easily it would require manual monitoring site by site, a time-consuming and labor intensive task. By using additional software to centralise its entire SharePoint environment, Lauren’s administrators were able to manage settings and permissions from one interface, saving 70 percent of their time which vastly increased their day-to-day productivity.
Productivity and cost savings are essential for any business today, and many look to technology such as SharePoint to help address these critical issues. However, for SharePoint to truly be an enabler of business collaboration and efficiency, it is vital that they have the ability to manage and protect the environment in a way that meets their specific needs. Third-party management and governance solutions such as the ones offered by AvePoint can help companies maintain high business productivity, save time, and lower total cost of ownership in order to more quickly realise return on investment.
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