Anglo American is one of the world’s largest mining groups – including platinum group metals, copper, iron ore, metallurgical coal, as well as nickel and thermal coal. The company has 107,000 full-time employees spread throughout Africa, Australia, Europe, the Americas and Asia,

The Challenge

With numerous facilities located worldwide, Anglo American turned to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 as an intranet portal and collaboration platform in order to provide workers – regardless of their location – with the most up-to-date information necessary.

Anglo American had just migrated from a distributed content management portal environment based on a competing platform to a consolidated, decentralised Microsoft SharePoint platform with three farms located in Johannesburg, South Africa; Santiago, Chile; and Brisbane, Australia. Upon completion of the migration, the environment began providing the organisation’s 20,000 SharePoint users with corporate communications and other business-related content out of the South African and Chilean environments whilst providing project collaboration, communities of practice, and team sites across all three farm instances.

The AvePoint Solution

After testing various third-party SharePoint replication solutions, Anglo American decided on AvePoint’s DocAve Replicator for SharePoint solution in July of 2009.

“DocAve Replicator worked very smoothly with our decentralised SharePoint environment”, said Mark Jarvis, Portal Owner, Group Applications at Anglo American.

“A major contributor to us finally deciding on AvePoint, though, was the quality of support provided.”

Global Real-time Replication of SharePoint Content

Immediately, Anglo American put DocAve Replicator to work in order to perform event-driven, two-way synchronisation of content among the organisation’s three SharePoint farms, located in Australia, Chile, and South Africa. DocAve enabled the administrators to create multiple replication plans, which included full replications every 12 hours as well as event-driven incremental replications among its geo-distributed farms.
To solve the issue of sporadic network connectivity and large events taking up precious bandwidth – such as a quarterly financial results presentation broadcast over the organisation’s network – Anglo American administrators used DocAve’s network throttling and scheduling functionality to ensure only a pre-established level of bandwidth was allocated for replication, so business productivity would continue unimpeded.
Throughout the entire purchase and implementation process, AvePoint’s sales and support teams consistently delivered high-quality service that not only impressed Anglo American’s SharePoint Project Team – it played an instrumental role in AvePoint winning the mining giant’s business.

“Our AvePoint sales representative was always available and willing to assist us when necessary”, Jarvis said. “The quality experience started right there – and honestly, AvePoint wins hands-down in terms of customer service.”

After purchasing DocAve Replicator, the Anglo American SharePoint Project Team contacted AvePoint support for assistance in the customising and configuring the solution. “I’ve been able to build a personal relationship with the AvePoint support team”, said Philip Reay, Anglo American’s SharePoint Program Architect. “If we have an issue, an AvePoint support representative is prepared to log on and assist us at the drop of a hat. It’s phenomenal; you just don’t get that from anywhere else.”

The Bottom Line

Using DocAve Replicator, Anglo American can now effectively deliver the most updated content for all 20,000-plus SharePoint users across three continents regardless of poor network connectivity. Furthermore, with both scheduled and event-driven replications, administrators can ensure there is enough bandwidth to prevent business disruptions that could derail operations.

As a result, Anglo American administrators are now more confident in its decentralised architecture thanks to DocAve, and are considering utilising additional solutions from the DocAve Software Platform to more efficiently and quickly manage its vast SharePoint environment.