A long term SharePoint user, law firm DLA Phillips Fox found success with AvePoint’s DocAve when it sought a solution for swift, automated movement of custom SharePoint content.

DLA Phillips Fox is one of the largest legal firms in Australasia, with offices in Auckland, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, and Wellington. A full service commercial firm, it services a broad cross-section of clients and industries. DLA Phillips Fox is a member of DLA Piper Group, an alliance of independent legal practices.

It has used various platform releases for internal document workflow, forms management, document templates, and overall document management. Since May 2010 the firm has been utilising Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as a company-wide intranet, encouraging greater collaboration and knowledge sharing among its distributed workforce.

The SharePoint Server 2010 environment is highly customised, with approximately 240 subsites, 10 master pages, and more than 1,000 web pages. Very quickly administrators at DLA Phillips Fox realised there was no seamless way to migrate news items, lists, announcements, web parts, documents, and other content from its User Acceptance Test (UAT) farm to its production farm.

Natively, SharePoint Server 2010 offers a backup-and-restore option that can back up the entire UAT farm and then deploy to production. However, administrators could not guarantee that the metadata and security settings for the content backed up in the UAT farm would be maintained once deployed to the production farm. The team would have to then recreate all the security properties manually, which is both time and resource intensive.

As SharePoint does not natively provide the ability to efficiently synchronise content across farms in real time with full fidelity DLA Phillips Fox began the search for a third-party content management solution.

The AvePoint Solution

After researching several third-party solutions, DLA Phillips Fox purchased DocAve Content Manager for SharePoint. “DocAve is an extremely intelligent platform for content management in SharePoint Server 2010”, said Sasank Namburi, Applications Development Manager at DLA Phillips Fox. “A major contributor to us in finally deciding to use AvePoint, though, was the quality of support provided.”

DLA Phillips Fox immediately utilised DocAve Content Manager’s two-URL tree system to copy live documents, web parts, and other customisations from its UAT farm to the production farm. With DocAve, Namburi was able to set up an automated synchronisation schedule in order to keep tabs on content across multiple farms that needed to be updated. Graphical domain and user mapping available with DocAve ensured complete data integrity, meaning all security settings, versioning, and other requisite metadata is maintained during the migration.

The ability to restructure content – including shifting subsites and top-level sites – ensures administrators can optimise the hierarchy of its SharePoint Server 2010 farms according to evolving business needs. “Any content can be updated across our multiple SharePoint farms within milliseconds with DocAve”, Sasank said. “That’s extremely beneficial for not only my IT department, but also for other stakeholders throughout the firm.”

AvePoint’s sales and support teams consistently delivered high-quality service throughout the entire purchase and implementation process, which greatly helped Sasank and his team infuse DocAve throughout the SharePoint Server 2010 deployment. Due to the highly customised nature of the organisation’s SharePoint environment it was vital that DocAve could be configured to meet those stringent needs.

“The AvePoint support team is a hardworking group that clearly addresses client issues quickly”, Sasank said. “They were able to help us ensure DocAve Content Manager met my specific business requirements for the SharePoint deployment. They have been extremely helpful.”

Using DocAve Content Manager, DLA Phillips Fox can now quickly copy and migrate customised SharePoint content from its UAT farm directly to the live production environment “within milliseconds”. Sasank said that DocAve has already saved his team approximately 75 to 100 days’ worth of work – and also improved his team’s morale. Furthermore, its automated, schedulable nature has enabled Sasank to not have to hire an additional, full-time employee to only take care of manual migrations of content throughout the deployment.

His superior experience with AvePoint’s support team led him to recommend AvePoint to DLA Piper, one of the world’s largest legal firm. Additionally, he is considering AvePoint’s DocAve Deployment Manager solution for automating deployment of customisations and solutions from UAT farms through to production.

“DocAve successfully addressed the largest challenge we faced with our SharePoint Server 2010 deployment – content migration”, Sasank concluded. “Consequently, as we continue to evolve in our use of SharePoint, DocAve will play an instrumental role.”