A Canada-based car club offering insurance has slashed IT workloads and boosted functionality for nine in ten of its end users with Microsoft 365 automation from ShareGate.
British Columbia based automotive club BCAA had been seeking a sustainable approach to managing Microsoft 365 (M365) and turned to ShareGate with a view to taking some of the burden off IT.
Neda Ilic, senior product owner for M365 at BCAA, says ShareGate’s management tools “filled the feature gaps” in M365 admin, including group management, “which is important to us”, and allows them to hand some tasks to its Teams owners.
“We had a lot of content and owners to support. If we spent all our time managing M365, we wouldn’t be available to help our end users get the most out of the cloud transition,” Ilic says.
Previously, the IT team couldn’t visualise their environment or adequately support end users, according to the vendor, but now its end users can perform 92% of management tasks, resulting in 26% fewer inactive teams and 33% fewer external sharing links.
Ilic says that for her the biggest benefit of using ShareGate is that it frees up IT time for other value-added activities, partly through effective security routines and purpose-built automations.
“I don’t have to baby-sit my environment because the governance guardrails are in place,” she says.
BCAA, which has more than a million members to serve with data to manage and secure, set up ShareGate’s automations to create sustainable routines for managing orphaned teams, inactive teams, and external sharing permissions in their M365 environment.
ShareGate enabled migration of BCAA’s 10TB file-share as well as delivering a long-term solution for better visibility and more secure control of functions such as permissions, searchability and storage space.
“We started the journey with our intranet, which was built on SharePoint Online,” says Ilic. “Then we moved users to the cloud and empowered them with Office 365 and OneDrive. The next step was moving all the content and collaboration onto Teams.”
During the original migration, she’d used the ShareGate pre-check report to identify potential issues and adjust the schedule to move mission-critical files during off-peak hours.
“ShareGate’s migration auditing capabilities were absolutely great. I could check in after each stage and get a full picture of what went well and what didn’t,” Ilic adds. “That visibility instilled confidence in the owners as well and uncovered things we didn’t even know existed.”
Click here to read the full ShareGate case study.
( Photo by Evgeny Tchebotarev on Unsplash )
