When investment management platform vendor SimCorp sought to better organise and secure its 2000-seat Microsoft 365 (M365) environment, the Denmark-based firm turned to ShareGate.
Jacob Maegaard Siggaard, principal application specialist at SimCorp, said in the ShareGate case study that the company had tried scripting our own app to identify unused sites.
“But after a month working with our external consultant, ShareGate’s tool came out and did the work for us. Now, it just sends us an email every week – it’s a huge time saving,” he said.
The IT team is now free to work on more value-add projects, after building up six years of M365 data without a “sustainable way” to track permissions and unused content for their large workforce.
Via ShareGate, some 15% of sites were found to be inactive and could then be removed.
Permissions reports now helped ensure access is secure, with automated prompts enabling team owners to take on more data management tasks.
Siggard, who supports all M365 applications, said that after the initial migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint Online, the company retained ShareGate to improve day-to-day data management.
“We realised it was very good to have this tool that gave us an overview of everything that had been migrated and all of the different permissions that were in place,” he said.
“When we migrated, we had a lot of teams and SharePoint sites, and we didn’t have a tool that could help us manage them. So they kept growing in numbers, and no one was deleting them.”
Accumulated data clutter can reduce efficiencies and increase costs, including around storage and manual handling of – in SimCorp’s case – many years’ worth of documents and thousands of employees worldwide.
“The old content was also messing up our search criteria and search results. Users weren’t able to find what they were looking for because there was so much clutter,” Siggard noted.
“Without ShareGate, we would have spent months creating or migrating everything manually.”
Siggard added that ShareGate’s reports facilitated “a lot of communication” in the organisation to boot.
For instance, when a SharePoint or Teams site remains unused for 90 days or another specified time, the team owner gets a message from ShareGate asking them whether it should be kept, archived, or deleted.
“We can see that a lot of content is being deleted or archived, and that has been a huge success for us,” he said. “It’s making our environment much cleaner.”
Read the full ShareGate case study here.
( Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay )
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