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With current technology to greater system security with more functionality

Atlantic - SharePoint farm upgrade and migration to SharePoint 2019

Atlantic Grupa d.d. is one of the most dynamic business systems in the region with offices and distribution centres in 7 countries, which carries out a significant part of its business in the EU. It stands behind a whole range of well-known brands such as Cedevita, Cockta, Barcaffe and Argeta and is the leading distributor of consumer goods in the region of Southeast Europe.

Easier system management with better performance

Atlantic Grupa has been relying on Microsoft technology for years, including the SharePoint platform for document storage, management and collaboration.

To simplify system management and improve its performance, they decided to consolidate all SQL databases and bring them to a single platform with version 2017. Since SharePoint 2013 does not support SQL database 2017, upgrading SharePoint was a necessary step on that way.

Key steps to success

In order to avoid any disruption to business processes and ensure the success of the project, the activities are divided into three main phases:

  1. preparation of server infrastructure,
  2. test farm migration and
  3. migration of the production farm.

The preparation of the server infrastructure included booting the server, installing the operating system and associated patches, and installing and configuring SharePoint Server 2016 as well as SharePoint Server 2019.

Since SharePoint 2013 cannot be migrated directly to SharePoint 2019, but needs to be inter-migrated to SharePoint 2016, each of these two main phases was divided into two sub-phases.

Migration challenges and how to solve them

When upgrading, it sometimes happens that the functionalities that were part of the old version, on the new one do not exist in the same form.

The complex intranet solution, as the main system for internal communication in this multinational company with its 7 language versions, also settled on the SharePoint platform and created an interesting challenge.

Namely, the features used on SharePoint 2013, which allowed commenting and rating news, were abandoned on SharePoint 2019. However, thanks to many years of expertise in the development of intranet solutions and with the help of Microsoft’s PowerShell script, Atlantic employees still have two-way communication on the new SP version.

The upgrade of a very complex farm, with a large number of databases, with a total size of about 2TB, ran completely smoothly, which we can thank for the excellent cooperation with the ITS SharePoint team and our KAM Goran Grgac. We are extremely satisfied with the level at which this cooperation took place.
Mirjana Jerinić

— Mirjana Jerinić

IT Business Solutions Director, Atlantic Grupa

A more secure environment with more data space and more functionality

This upgrade provides the system with a new and more advanced infrastructure. By expanding from four to eight servers, the increased needs for SharePoint used by the group’s trading and manufacturing companies in 8 markets have been met. With more data space, performance in the availability of SP applications has also increased, content indexing has improved and search has been accelerated.

The new version of SP has more sophisticated backup capabilities and more reliable disaster recovery procedures, which has further contributed to ensuring business continuity.

Thanks to integration with OneDrive, employees access documents stored on SharePoint via Windows Explorer as if the documents were part of a local operating system, and SP provides them with additional functionality such as versioning, indexing, searching, security and backup. And there are a number of new SP functionalities that allow Atlantic to develop modern applications for internal needs.

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