Mobile Area Water and Sewer System (MAWSS) is a long-time client of Bit-Wizards. The relationship began in 2009 when MAWSS needed help with their initial on-premises SharePoint development. When Microsoft discontinued support for SharePoint 2010 on premises, MAWSS needed a partner to help them navigate the complexities of this decision.
The Challenge
Mobile Area Water and Sewer System (MAWSS) is a long-time client of Bit-Wizards. The relationship began in 2009 when MAWSS needed help with their initial on-premises SharePoint development. When Microsoft discontinued support for SharePoint 2010 on premises, MAWSS needed a partner to help them navigate the complexities of this decision.
MAWSS hosted an extensive SharePoint 2010 corporate intranet on premise that included company-wide calendaring, conference room scheduling, HR documentation, an IT ticketing system, weather alerts for employees, as well as submission forms for various company functions, employee services, and photo galleries from corporate events. The SharePoint 2010 site also had custom branding applied to it to match the company’s website. The MAWSS team wanted give their users the ability to be mobile while accessing the SharePoint data. Along with that mobility was a requirement for a custom end-user guide to help educate and assist the end users on how to use the SharePoint portal. MAWSS also had over 90 gigabytes of training videos that were housed on a local file share on their network. These videos are in constant use for viewing by various departments and employees. Due to the large number, size, and outdated file types of these combined video files, MAWSS users continued to have viewing issues, and bandwidth consumption between physical locations was a major issue, and viewers had to be connected to the internal network to access the file share. This was a continual problem that required a solution as well.
The Solution
Bit-Wizards’ IT team consulted with MAWSS and explained that merely upgrading to SharePoint 2013 on premises wouldn’t solve their true need from a security and cost standpoint and since the 2016 version of SharePoint on premises was at that time still in beta, the best option would be to migrate their existing SharePoint implementation to SharePoint online. This would easily achieve their need for mobility while also giving them the added bonus of a cost savings by not having to incur hardware capital cost that would be necessary for an on-prem solution. Also, since this solution is part of the Office 365 suite of products, updates are automatically pushed to users, so their solution is always cutting edge and filled with the best new features.
For the video viewing solution,
Sam Blowes—Bit-Wizards’ SharePoint Developer—developed a solution that houses all the videos online using the Office 365 video portal back-end. He converted all the videos to a modern standardized format and created an online player solution that allows users to view any video at any time on demand—from anywhere in the world because they are all stored in MAWSS’ SharePoint Online instance.
The Result
SharePoint can’t be simply upgraded, and so it requires a complete migration. The migration from SharePoint 2010 on premise to SharePoint Online was smooth, and the end solution worked just as planned for the MAWSS end users.
Since the move to Office 365, all MAWSS users have the most updated version of the full Microsoft Web App Office Suite, whereas before they had multiple desktop versions of Microsoft Office and their I.T. team had to manage all the licenses and deal with version issues that come when users share documents created in different and outdated versions of Office.
Bit-Wizards has been working with Mobile Area Water and Sewer Systems (MAWSS) for a number of years now. They were instrumental in guiding us through the entire selection process of an applicable Share Point Infrastructure and platform to be used at our Utility for our Internal Organizational Portal. Their subject matter experts and knowledge base in this technology helped us implement a functional and reliable Internal SharePoint Portal that is utilizing the latest Microsoft Technology. I can safely say that it will be used for years to come, and I am proud to have Bit-Wizards as our strategic software development partners for this and other projects when needed.
- Mahir Butt, IT Director, Mobile Area Water & Sewer System
Before the migration, MAWSS employees were spending excessive amounts of time updating corporate calendars manually using a web interface. Now they can connect outlook to their SharePoint corporate calendars which facilitates a more efficient management of information.
Lastly, the migration fulfilled the need to be fully mobile. The MAWSS remote workers can access any of their needed documents at any time without having to connect to a VPN, and can use Microsoft’s suite of portable apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone to access their company Intranet.