How a Construction Management Company Solved Their Fragmented Content Strategy

06.19.2020

Partnering with Microsoft, DryvIQ helped one of America’s largest construction firms migrate to SharePoint Online to solve their fragmented content strategy.

One of the Largest Construction Management Companies in the US Migrates to SharePoint

Company Profile

This construction management firm provides general contracting, design-build, and integrated project delivery services on projects small and large for a wide range of customers. With over 50 offices nationwide, they have a strong presence throughout the United States. And with that comes a lot of sprawling content to manage.

Support Diverse Needs of Employees and Content Consolidation

Business Drivers

Like most architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) organizations, this privately-held American firm struggled with a fragmented content strategy as it strived to support the diverse needs of project workers and information workers. This uncontrollable sprawl of content and repositories made it increasingly difficult to standardize processes relevant to content retention, governance, and DR/HA. As a result, the organization could be left open to vulnerabilities and inefficiencies. 

In an effort to minimize risk and streamline efficiencies around content management, the company has elected to consolidate all legacy repositories and migrate to Microsoft’s SharePoint Online from their NAS servers and current cloud storage.

The firm needed a solution to help them with their fragmented content strategy. They had been a loyal customer of their current cloud storage provider for more than eight years, yet they were still relying on local NAS servers among over 200 project sites to provide “local survivability” to project teams and regional 30+ office servers for information workers. The COO’s goal was to create a single source of truth for all content, enabling them to manage content governance at a global level, remove risk around DR/HA and improve local access to content in the field.

Remote Sites Create a Fragmented Content Storage Strategy

The Problem

Workers at project sites require localized infrastructure and storage due to bandwidth challenges, while information workers in bandwidth-abundant Regional Offices connect to servers within the Regional Datacenters. Eventually, these different requirements made it difficult to deploy and manage standardization processes for things like search, content classification/DLP, and content retention (archival and deletion). And without creating, documenting, and deploying global content retention and governance policies, the company cannot effectively navigate legal disputes that may arise down the line.

If the company cannot create a single source of truth with full-fidelity, integration of critical information such as ‘author preservation’ and ‘last modified data’ will not be retained. Therefore, that information will not be available to track when associated with legal disputes. There are additional issues with this as well; without synchronizing all content silos in one location, the firm cannot ensure all content is highly-available and recoverable in DR scenarios. And without automating synchronization of job-site content to one location, the firm also runs the risk of delayed or inaccurate information being passed along due to the required manual processes for backing up content with a USB drive.

Migrate to SharePoint Online for Synchronization

The Solution

Initially, the company was considering synchronizing remote sites, regional office servers, and corporate data centers to the present cloud storage as a solution. However, this would’ve been very resource-intensive and their cloud storage services did not offer the desired synchronization capabilities. They needed to find a different solution.

The firm began engaging with multiple file migration tool vendors to determine the best execution strategy. They executed pilots to evaluate the platforms head-to-toe for performance, remediation, reliability, and deployment flexibility. Ultimately, the company chose to use DryvIQ due to its flexibility to support the organization’s diverse needs of a cloud-to-cloud migration and an on-premises to cloud migration. Not to mention, DryvIQ offered subject matter expertise to help them through choosing between new cloud storage providers.

With help from Microsoft and DryvIQ, the construction company migrated to SharePoint online, moving over 200 TB and 200 servers to SPOL and Office 365 in five months. As a result, the company successfully created a single repository to manage, access, and govern all active and archived project content, thus mitigating risk and automating processes.

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