Quest says the college is now protected against any potential data loss if there is a problem with the intranet. The intranet is primarily used to deliver management information and to share common resources.
Prior to the installation, the college’s software support team conducted backups of the content that staff provided and managed. If any sites on the SharePoint-based staff intranet were lost or deleted, the entire application needed to be overwritten to enable the lost data to be restored. This included any subsequently updated content.
The ability to offer a full granular restoration direct from a standard SQL backup file, as well as intuitive user interface, persuaded the college to selected Quest’s offering.
Peter Green, software support manager, West Suffolk College, said: Lots of time and effort has been invested in the SharePoint intranet to make it a valuable resource for management of the college. Recovery Manager for SharePoint is our insurance policy against loss. We are completely confident that in the event of loss, we’ll be able to recover the application quickly and easily.
According to the company, Quest’s Recovery Manager for SharePoint provides emergency access to all SharePoint content. Quest says recovered content can be restored directly to the SharePoint instance or saved to a file system. Any content, such as individual documents, lists, document libraries, sites, or workspaces, held in the database can be restored separately. The system is compatible with SQL databases.
Users are able to search, locate and preview any content from a variety of database backups before restoring it.
West Suffolk College has also implemented Quest’s Site Administrator for SharePoint. This enables the college to manage the SharePoint environment. The system contains built-in global policy settings, which Quest says can reduce the risk of poor network performance, server storage issues, security breaches, support backlogs and failures to comply with information requests.
Site Administrator drives us to be proactive, allowing us to resolve any issues, such as poor performance or shortage of disk space, early on before the problem develops and before they affect the users. The resulting time savings allow us to focus on adding value to the service we provide for the college, said Green.
Green believes the College has already benefited from the system with the peace of mind it offers. He said: If we were to lose SharePoint content, Recovery Manager would restore that content in a matter of minutes. Without the Quest solution, it could take us days to recover, with no guarantee of a perfect restore, and every chance of severely irritated users. There is no doubt in my mind that if disaster were to strike, the ROI of our Quest solution would be well over 100%.
