City Will Also Turn to Axceler Davinci Migrator to Help Migrate and Enhance Its Growing Central Information Hub based on SharePoint
WOBURN, MA – March 29, 2011 –Axceler,the leader in Microsoft SharePoint administration and migration, today announced that the City of Charlotte, NC, is using Axceler’s ControlPoint, the company’s award-winning SharePoint administration software, to better manage its large and complex SharePoint environment. In addition the North Carolina municipality also will be deploying the company’s Davinci Migrator product to manage its upcoming SharePoint 2010 upgrade.
“Tasks that used to require so much time to handle manually now can be accomplished in a fraction of the time with ControlPoint. The time savings for us is huge,” noted Kyle Wright, SharePoint Infrastructure Support Manager for the City of Charlotte. “ControlPoint is the only reason we’ve been able to stay ahead of our growing environment without increasing headcount.”
Ease of use and the ability to help manage a more formal SharePoint environment were driving factors in the City of Charlotte’s initial decision to choose Axceler’s ControlPoint. With seven SharePoint farms running on nearly two dozen servers – and with both internet and intranet components -- the City of Charlotte’s SharePoint environment serves the needs of some 6,500 employees in the city’s fourteen key business units. The applications supported in its SharePoint environment range from mission-critical capabilities like records management and team collaboration sites, to informational functions such as posting benefits information, to less formal applications like the online employee swap shop. ControlPoint helps Wright better address burdensome but essential administration tasks – such as replacing outmoded web parts – that were difficult to tackle with native SharePoint administrative tools.
“ControlPoint’s ability to handle so many administrative tasks – like generating web part reports by site and by web part – was a key factor in our decision to go with Axceler,” Wright said. “And this turned out to be even more important than we originally anticipated.”
Wright has used ControlPoint to create a new permission and inheritance structure in the city’s SharePoint environment, and to distribute site administration to the city’s key business units. ControlPoint’s analysis and reports also enabled Charlotte to hit the go-live commitment on its new external facing web site.
The City plans to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 this summer with the help of Axceler’s Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010. Besides taking advantage of the latest SharePoint technology, one of the city’s main goals is to restructure its SharePoint farms in order to support a much more modular approach to data backups and restores. “We were originally on SharePoint 2003, and our usage has grown exponentially,” explained Wright. “One of the real benefits of Davinci was that, during the migration, we can completely reorganize our content and sites, create new site collections and create new databases. By reorganizing our data along departmental lines, we’ll make our migration process faster and more efficient.”
