The City of Bellevue Secures Sensitive Content Across 18,000 Site Collections with Metalogix ControlPoint

OVERVIEW

The City of Bellevue is the fifth largest city in the state of Washington, with a population of more than 130,000. Following a statewide initiative, technology is now a core enabler of many of the City of Bellevue’s programs including enhancing community participation in government, bringing city services to customers’ doorsteps and making information easily and broadly available. To achieve this mission, the City of Bellevue government relies on SharePoint, a business-critical tool that supports its pledge to deliver and maintain what it calls the “three C’s” – “Creation, Content and Collaboration”.

• Using a SharePoint 2010 platform for content management and collaboration. Incorporating one terabyte of content, 18,000 sites and 10 site collections.
• Metalogix tools and support provide superior control over entire SharePoint environment – saving time and reducing SharePoint sprawl.
• Able to maintain an organized, transparent SharePoint environment today laying the foundation for a smooth, efficient migration in the future.
• Solutions deployed: ControlPoint.

THE CHALLENGE

To keep pace with advancing technology, Bellevue undertook a migration from SharePoint 2007 to 2010. The migration, however, quickly proved to be a painful learning experience.

In the face of SharePoint sprawl, site and content cleanup proved particularly challenging and involved manual, time-consuming processes. As Tanya Shmat, a Systems Analyst with the City of Bellevue explained: “Before Metalogix ControlPoint, I was writing PowerShell scripts all day and would have to sort everything manually. It was very easy to miss something if things were sorted or filtered wrong.”

In addition, SharePoint out-of-the-box tools fell short when it came to supporting federal, state and local document management and retention policies. Incorrect permission levels and a lack of visibility into these gave users access to sites and content privileges that should have been restricted.

“We desperately needed a technology solution that could enforce our stringent governance policies and make sure we avoided potential litigation.”

After completing the one terabyte migration to SharePoint 2010, Bellevue’s IT department established a “SharePoint Cleanup Project.” Its goals were numerous:

• Easily and securely cleanup and manage permissions across its 18,000 site collections.
• Locate and remove inactive and old test sites.
• Identify who was accessing what content.
• Reduce the Bellevue’s financial and litigation risk (according to state code, no public records shall be destroyed until approved for destruction by the appropriate Records Committee. Non-compliance can result risk thousands of dollars in fines and penalties).

Faced with limited resources and inadequate out-of-the-box SharePoint tools, Bellevue also needed a solution that would not require complex, time-consuming PowerShell scripting.

THE SOLUTION

The City of Bellevue chose Metalogix ControlPoint to manage its SharePoint 2010 environment and its 1,500 users and prepare for future migration projects.

An industry-leading security, administration and governance solution, Metalogix ControlPoint is purpose-built for SharePoint and lets users secure their environment by automatically enforcing governance and administering complex SharePoint environments with ease – from a single user interface accessed from SharePoint’s user interface.

Through Metalogix ControlPoint’s single console, IT can clean up and manage permissions and apply and enforce records retention policies across all sites, site collections or farms. Governance can also be delegated to site managers, freeing up IT. Users can automatically create sites with approved access privileges, use of versioning, file upload limits, site quotas and use of site templates.

A distinct strength of Metalogix ControlPoint is its powerful audit and governance features that take the pain out of complex and time-consuming compliance, auditing and reporting tasks. Instead of waiting days to run PowerShell scripts and filter through reports, Bellevue can respond to requests (and potential audits) in minutes not days. This enabled Shmat’s team to identify user or administrator activity with unparalleled granularity – from configuration changes to documents accessed.

In addition, Metalogix ControlPoint’s site creation and governance features enable users to easily create SharePoint sites that automatically contain the various permission and other configurations needed to adhere to applicable regulations. When a user requests to create a new site from within the SharePoint user interface, it is possible to select a “policy template,” and the site is automatically created with all the correct configurations.

THE RESULTS

With the help of Metalogix ControlPoint, the Bellevue’s “SharePoint Cleanup Project” has already reaped significant time, productivity and potentially cost savings.

• Greater transparency and control of permissions – With Metalogix ControlPoint, Bellevue can confidently manage permission policy compliance and put an end to rogue document creation and deletion. “Permissions were not set up the right way when the sites were first created. With ControlPoint we were able to see those different groups and individuals who were accessing sites and document libraries and adjust as we needed.”
• A cleaner SharePoint environment – Metalogix ControlPoint proved an invaluable tool in support of the Bellevue’s “SharePoint Cleanup Project”. Cleanups are streamlined but while offering greater attention to detail. “It was very useful that I was able to run an inventory report for each individual site collection. It was our starting point on cleaning up some of the sites that are no longer needed.”
• Self-service for business analysts – Bellevue can now run queries and reports much quicker. “It’s a very useful tool. Instead waiting a couple of days for a PowerShell script to run and then clean-up the results, with ControlPoint I can do it myself and get the results in a few minutes,” said Shmat.
• Document retention compliance and protection against fines – Retention policies are now easily applied, reducing the risk of litigation and financial penalties. With Metalogix ControlPoint, the Bellevue’s IT team can set retention of documents to last for any amount of time
• Monitoring user adoption – Metalogix ControlPoint has also proved a useful tool for gauging the value and return on investment in tax payer dollars that SharePoint provides. By monitoring user activity, Metalogix ControlPoint makes it easy to determine who is accessing which documents. This insight can be used to investigate or set permission policies and discover best practices to improve user adoption elsewhere.