success stories

Avvenire shrinks SharePoint migration time by 15% with ShareGate

Solution provider Avvenire uses ShareGate to do nearly all its SharePoint migrations. Why? For fast, comprehensive, error-free, “set-it-and-forget-it” migrations.

Challenge

Performing large-scale migrations for clients means they need to be able to migrate quickly, securely, and flawlessly.

Solution

Reports and increased visibility help identify issues quickly, so they can be addressed or eliminated before migration.

Results

75% reduction in effort for larger migrations, as well as 30% licensing savings compared to other migration tools.

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Are you looking to migrate your SharePoint environment? Whether you need to migrate to a newer version, to the cloud, to another tenant—or maybe just reorganize within a single tenant or farm—you’re part of a growing club of IT admins looking to modernize and improve their SharePoint environments.

This is according to Doug Punchak, someone who ought to know.

As the Application Development Manager at Avvenire Solutions, Doug works with a team of IT professionals who offer productivity solutions and collaboration services. This includes SharePoint and Microsoft 365 migrations for middle market, Fortune 500 companies, and educational institutions.

“We’re definitely seeing an increase in requests for SharePoint migrations,” says Punchak. “Everyone wants to do them. Many are running on older versions and know they need to upgrade; some want it as part of a move to the cloud; others are integrating acquisitions or responding to divestitures.”

The user’s needs

A migration software they can trust

Avvenire implements SharePoint migrations for utility companies, manufacturers, financial services firms—even the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team.

These clients have almost nothing in common—almost.

What’s common among them is a desire to keep their SharePoint environments as modern as possible and their trust in Avvenire to help them do so.

Another thing these diverse organizations have in common is that Avvenire successfully implemented their SharePoint migrations with its tool of choice: ShareGate, our powerful SharePoint migration tool. It’s the tool that enables fast, reliable migrations from file shares, SharePoint Server, SharePoint Online, Box, or Google Drive to a host of supported destinations (Microsoft 365, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Teams, or on-prem SharePoint 2013/2016/2019).

“Our goal is to delight our customers with a fast, rock-solid, reliable SharePoint migration that helps them achieve their business goals,” says Punchak. “We absolutely trust ShareGate to help us do that. It just works.”

The effort would quadruple if we had to do everything manually…. it almost couldn’t be done without ShareGate.

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– Doug Punchak, Application Development Manager, Avvenire Solutions

Key features

ShareGate offers fast and reliable migrations

Speed and reliability are especially important to organizations that want to run time-sensitive, big-bang migrations on a weekend and have employees return to an upgraded, flawlessly running environment the following Monday. Avvenire uses several features and capabilities in ShareGate to make this possible.

For example, he points to the software’s ability to manage the throttling limitations of new tenants transparently and in the background, so migration speeds are optimized automatically.

Punchak says ShareGate runs at “insane speeds”—which means neither he, his team, nor their clients need to worry about content not being migrated because of a throttling limitation.

The software simply requires installation on a compatible PC with access to the organization’s SharePoint. It doesn’t need to be installed on the server and doesn’t require on-site installation or configuration—all features that support fast, reliable, and effective migrations.

Added value

Comprehensive SharePoint migration reports

Another factor that helps ensure fast, reliable migrations is careful planning and reporting.

The Avvenire team uses ShareGate’s Source analysis report before a migration to identify breaks in site inheritance, unused content, and orphaned user accounts—so they can be addressed or eliminated before implementation.

Punchak says ShareGate’s reporting capabilities are enormously helpful, in particular for clients that want to start with seed migrations to “kick the tires” on new SharePoint environments before undertaking a full migration. Before running a full or partial migration of content not included in the seed migration, Avvenire’s techs run a document level report listing all items modified within a certain date range.

That narrows down which sites, lists, and libraries need to be migrated.

“With ShareGate’s reporting capabilities, we can save considerable time on scheduled migrations,” says Punchak. “It’s ‘set it and forget it.’”

The Avvenire team feels that these features contribute to a comprehensive, more automated migration of site collections, content, and security configurations, with little or no need for error correction or rework.

“Not having to go back and fix things manually and rebuild content saves us 15% of project time and helps make our larger projects possible. We couldn’t imagine doing this without ShareGate.”

But there was a time when he did.

An easy decision

Excellent return on investment

Avvenire formerly used another SharePoint migration tool but found its lack of reporting capabilities lead to difficult planning and implementation. And then there was the cost. The former tool was expensive to license, putting it beyond the budget of Avvenire’s smaller clients.

The problem wasn’t just the cost of the license, but also its structure. That other tool put a cap on the volume of content that could be migrated per license—so most clients, who started projects without a clear understanding of how much content they needed to migrate, had a hard time accurately anticipating the licensing cost.

We don’t have any anxiety after the fact… because we know that ShareGate just works

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Avvenire found that ShareGate addressed these concerns, with its rich reporting capability, lower per-license cost—about 30% lower in their experience—and unrestricted volume on migrations per-license.

“We have clients that purchase a ShareGate annual license and know that it will cover them regardless of new needs that arise during the year,” says Punchak. “One client made ShareGate a part of its acquisition plan. We migrated their tenant, and the client later acquired two other companies. We used the same license to move that SharePoint content, too.”

The Ohio-based consulting group sees a bright future for ShareGate in their toolkit. “As more clients come to us requesting more complex migrations to a greater variety of environments, ShareGate will continue to be our go-to tool. It all comes down to the quality of the result it delivers for us and our clients.”

Avvenire Solutions provides business productivity solutions to middle market and Fortune 500 companies and educational institutions. Their goal is to become their clients’ trusted advisor by collaborating with Microsoft and other “best of breed” technology partners to drive solutions that support key business goals. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Avvenire focuses on delivering business productivity solutions using the latest Microsoft technologies and strategies.