Searching For A Better, Faster SharePoint Migration
The popularity of previous SharePoint versions led many organizations to deploy SharePoint across various business units and departments—frequently on a large scale. Many of these organizations are now attracted to the key functionality improvements in SharePoint 2010, which usually means a migration project is in order. The need for speed is an operational imperative for organizations undertaking a SharePoint migration-the quicker the project is complete, the sooner the organization can reap the benefits.
As more organizations upgrade from SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007 into SharePoint 2010, or migrate file shares or legacy document and content management systems to SharePoint, speed will continue to be a critical operational need. The speed of SharePoint migrations, whether on-premises or in the cloud, will directly relate to how organizations can enhance the use and improve the economics of their SharePoint environments.
Case Study: Health Care Logistics
Columbus, Ohio-based Health Care Logistics identified speed as vital after it made the decision to upgrade from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2010.
With four separate offices and two data centers, the company wanted to upgrade to improve productivity and content manageability. However, its small IT staff was frustrated by the tedious process it would have been faced with by using native Microsoft tools.
"We didn't want to have to recreate all of our unstructured data," said Kurt Wolf, technology director for Health Care Logistics. "It would have taken us over four weeks to recreate it and that would have taken away from critical path projects. We just couldn't afford to do that."
Instead, the company sought out third-party vendors that could provide a seamless migration solution to automate the process while maintaining metadata and user-edit information. They found Metalogix Migration Manager for SharePoint, which reduced their migration time from more than four weeks to only two days.
They now have an intuitive copy-and-paste user interface that allows Health Care Logistics to quickly consolidate all SharePoint sites, libraries, lists, Web parts and permissions between servers, all while maintaining full fidelity in preserving views, version chains, metadata and user-edit information. Without the need to build temporary farms, the company's SharePoint content was rapidly migrated directly from unattached content databases to live sites and the company was able to quickly take advantage of the robust features found in SharePoint 2010.
Case Study: Knight Frank LLC
Knight Frank LLC, a multinational real estate firm based in London and New York, faced a similarly daunting challenge. With a SharePoint 2007 deployment already in place, the company made the organizational decision to upgrade to SharePoint 2010. However, the SharePoint environment had expanded well past 700GB on a single content database and the bloated database was causing backup problems as well as making single document restores nearly impossible to achieve.
"We needed a simplified solution to aid in our migration from SharePoint 2007 to 2010 while also enabling us to restore various items from the backup files," said James White, technical architect at Knight Frank.
Knight Frank enlisted the help of ClearPeople, a London-based SharePoint business solution specialist, to devise its upgrade strategy. For the Knight Frank SharePoint team, the main challenge was finding the best method to manage content in a SharePoint 2010 environment while bringing across only business-critical documents from existing file shares and SharePoint 2007 content.
After evaluating several vendors, Knight Frank and ClearPeople selected a suite of solutions from Metalogix based on its feature set, common user interface and SharePoint integration.
Knight Frank was able to reduce its database from 700GB to 48GB. They externalized their unstructured SharePoint content, known as Binary Large Objects (BLOBS), and stored them on less expensive or more appropriate tiers of storage. Because of this, the size of the SharePoint content databases was dramatically reduced while still maintaining the critical metadata in the SQL Server database to ensure content is easily discovered and retrieved.
Knight Frank is now able to simplify the process of restoring individual documents and list items stored in native SharePoint backups without needing to rebuild the entire product database or deploy a temporary SharePoint recovery farm. Instead, Knight Frank can connect directly to its native SQL Server backup files and navigate them as though they were live SharePoint sites.
Metalogix is a trusted provider of innovative management solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and cloud platforms. We deliver high-performance solutions to scale and cost-effectively manage, migrate, store, archive and protect enterprise content. Metalogix provides global support to thousands of customers and strategic partners and is a Microsoft Gold Partner, a managed partner in Microsoft's High Potential ISV Group and a GSA provider. For more information please call 877-450-8667 or visit www.metalogix.com.