May 182011

Microsoft Technology Center Performs SharePoint Migration to Microsoft IT with AvePoint

The Microsoft Technology Centers migrated approximately 12,000 site collections and 200 custom lists from SharePoint 2007 to Microsoft IT hosted platform in six weeks with DocAve

AvePoint, a proven leader in providing infrastructure management software solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, today announced that the Microsoft Technology Centers (MTCs), a collaborative environment that helps organizations achieve their business goals using Microsoft and partner technologies, used DocAve to perform a migration of its data and content stored on SharePoint 2007 to a Microsoft-internal hosted SharePoint 2010 environment.

“AvePoint’s DocAve Migrator solution saved us significant time and effort in the MTC’s migration to the Microsoft IT hosted service,” said Chuck McCann, Worldwide MTC Alliances Program Director, Microsoft. “Not only did it vastly improve the productivity of our migration team, it allowed our business to continue focusing on our mission: To tirelessly serve organizations using Microsoft technologies to solve their technical and business challenges.”

The MTC migration team deployed DocAve Migrator for SharePoint to perform a migration of the data and content stored on its SharePoint 2007 environment to an on-premises SharePoint 2010 staging farm before migrating to the hosted SharePoint 2010 environment without losing customizations, metadata, securities, and other information vital to ensuring the data would still be easily searchable for MTC employees to use for daily tasks.

With DocAve, the MTCs:

Reduced total migration time by two months
Migrated 12,000 site collections from SharePoint 2007 to the hosted SharePoint 2010 service
Transferred approximately 200 lists while maintaining customizations, metadata, and field values
Minimized business disruption by scheduling migration jobs to automatically occur off-hours

“DocAve’s features ensured our migration team could confidently run migrations faster, and without disrupting ongoing business,” said Toby Tobescu, Senior Technology Specialist, Microsoft.

“MTC’s successful SharePoint migration is another gratifying affirmation of AvePoint’s proven ability to help organizations worldwide take full advantage of SharePoint’s potential for helping companies improve productivity,” said Dr. Tianyi (TJ) Jiang, Co-Chief Executive Officer of AvePoint.

To watch the MTC video case study featuring Mr. McCann and Mr. Tobescu, please visit our MTC Migration to SharePoint 2010 page.

To learn more about MTC’s experience with DocAve, as well as those of other companies worldwide, please visit our Customer Success Story page.

About AvePoint

AvePoint is a global technology company and proven software leader. Since its founding in 2001, AvePoint has become one of the world’s largest providers of infrastructure management software solutions for SharePoint, offering a fully integrated solution for SharePoint lifecycle management. Propelled by one of the world’s largest SharePoint-exclusive research & development teams, AvePoint helps more than 8,000 customers – including many Fortune 500 companies and government agencies – meet their specific business objectives by unleashing SharePoint’s full potential. AvePoint, Inc. is headquartered and maintains its principle engineering center in Jersey City, NJ, with wholly owned sales and engineering centers in the USA, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and China. AvePoint is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and GSA provider.

Published: 5/18/2011 7:50 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

May 032011

Why I have an iPad

I have been getting this question A LOT and always promised a blog post…so here it is.

I have had an iPad since it was originally released in US, thanks to Mark Miller queuing for me at the Apple Store in New York and sending it to me in Perth Winking smile

My primary original reason for purchasing it was to replace my Fujitsu T5010 Windows 7 tablet PC as it is smaller and lighter. I had already retired this laptop as my primary workhorse…thanks to the massive requirements of SharePoint 2010 from RAM perspective and upgraded to a Lenovo W510 which I can’t recommend enough!

I was (and still am on W510) a bit OneNote 2010 user. On the tablet it was great to have handwriting support with the WACOM pen and the ability to leveraged Microsoft’s underrated handwriting recognition search support to find things amongst all my scribbles!

Penultimate

So the first thing I did when I got the iPad was start looking for a OneNote replacement. Unfortunately…there isn’t one. I’ve tried absolutely everything on the marketplace. The only thing that comes close to that experience from a writing experience is Penultimate. From a Stylus perspective…there are some you can buy on eBay but they only lasted me about a month before they started “wearing out”. I have tried A LOT of them too (soft foam tips, hard rubber tips etc.). But I since found the Stylus Socks which are both cheaper and still haven’t run out after 6 months!

Penultimate has been great for me and it has improved a lot in terms of multiple notebook support and navigation around notebooks. The killer request would be that cross notebook handwriting recognition search, but its not there “yet”!

I do find that I double up, much like I did in OneNote actually with typing up notes for meeting minutes. But luckily in my new role I don’t tend to do that much so can leave them all as unofficial scribbles!

So other than for a note taking in meetings, what else do you use it for?

Bedroom (and toilet) surfing

Whenever I try and walk into bed with a tablet or notebook computer, I’m immediately gruffed at. With the iPad, there is no gruffing…not sure why as it pretty much does exactly what I do on the other two devices! Winking smile Essentially I use it to surf the web, check my mail, catch up on Twitter and Facebook.

Pulse news Reader

Pulse is an amazing app that should be installed first on the iPad. It allows you to add RSS Feeds (and pick from popular ones directly in the app) and it cleverly picks a appropriate image as an icon. It makes for a great experience for me getting through my gadget tech feeds each evening!

iAnnotate PDF

I often want to read PDFs on my iPad. I dump them on my PC to my DropBox and then can open them in this app. The great thing about this app is I can annotate the PDFs. This is awesome if I have to fill in a form as I can actually write on it with my stylus and then send it as an email Winking smile no more printing and scanning anymore! Paperless for me for a long time!

Popplet

I absolutely loved MindJet MindManager on my PC, apart from the price ofcourse. Popplet is a great little mind mapping tool for the iPad. I actually planned my whole Wedding Speech on that and printed it out as prompts during the big day! Love that for initial brain dumping or planning out articles.

NHL Game Centre

I am a HUUUUUUUUGE NHL fan and in Perth where nothing is screened and sitting in front of a laptop with in burning you private parts is not my idea of a night in. The iPad has a superb interface to these videos and use this a lot to catch up over breakfast on the playoffs etc. The one thing I’ve noticed now I’m in New York is that some games are “blacked out” because they are local, which means I need cable to watch them!

Formula 1

I’m a HUUUGE Formula 1 fan and had the app for the iPhone and before that used to sit with my laptop running next to the TV with the lap times pinging up. now I have a full real-time…yes REAL-TIME…3D…yes 3D map of the track showing all the cars during the race! Plus laptimes etc. It’s an amazingly immersive experience. I’m surprised that you don’t see them on grid day yet.

iRig

I recently bought an awesome Fender Deluxe Stratocaster electric guitar and didn’t want to buy an amp until I moved to US. iRig gives me the ability to plug my guitar into my iPad and use it as an amp and then pass the sound output into my head phones or any speaker I want!

Osmos

A retro classic brought to the iPad and I must say…at first I was like “what’s all the fuss about”, then someone gave it to me and I couldn’t put it down!

Scrabble

This game was awesome as a kid, and having it hooked up to iPhones and iPod Touches as Tile Racks is simply ingenious!

FlipBoard

FlipBoard is like Pulse is to RSS for Facebook and other social media. I love the way this takes the old magazine paradigm. I do find myself going back to the basic Facebook web site as I can interact with things, but it is beautiful to see.

Would I buy an iPad 2?

Nah…as Andrew Connell mentioned in a recent SharePoint Pod Show “I don’t want to pay $800 for a front and rear facing camera”. Granted it’s thinner, has a quicker processor but that’s about it. It’s a incremental upgrade…think SharePoint 2007 SP1 Winking smile

Published: 5/3/2011 7:15 PM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

May 032011

Backwards in coming forwards…the US EAD Form!

We’ve now been here for a few weeks, moving into our beautiful 1 bedroom apartment in Manhattan on the 18th April. Luckily we didn’t need Social Security numbers to secure our place, as I only just got that last Thursday! Sadly I couldn’t get paid until I had my Social Security number, so the credit cards have taken a hammering. So lesson 1 in this post is always budget for not getting income for a while and also budget for 3x months worth of rent.

The next thing that has tripped us up, is when we went to get our Social Security numbers, my wife couldn’t on her E3-D because what we weren’t told she needed an EAD Form (i-765) approved. We’ve been advised this can take up to 90 days and my wife can’t work without it! We also couldn’t apply for this before we’d been in the country for 10 whole days. We had to have our i-94 (which is what you get when you land at passport control) as this gives you your “alien number”, so couldn’t have done this before arriving. Loving the “alien” title, so very welcoming to the country! There was nothing we could have done to speed this up, but at least we could have prepared ourselves better.

To me, this seems extremely backwards. Essentially it means that as a couple, and potentially with children, we need to live on one income! I feel partly responsible for my wife being in this state and as much as its great for her to be able to explore….if the roles were reversed, I’d be scratching the walls to get back to work and a routine. The biggest thing we’ve found with this is that its harder to meet people without socializing each day with work colleagues.

So everyone keep their fingers crossed that the EAD is processed quickly! Winking smile

We are both absolutely loving living here and exploring on the weekends! I’ll post more about what we’ve done etc. later on.

Published: 5/3/2011 6:43 PM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

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