Real Estate Firm Knight Frank With Metalogix

Metalogix Software, provider of content lifecycle management solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange, and Cloud platforms, announced that Knight Frank, a multinational real estate and property service firm, has standardized on Metalogix’s suite of solutions for SharePoint migration, management and data protection.

Selecting Metalogix Migration Manager for SharePoint, Metalogix StoragePoint and Metalogix Selective Restore Manager for SharePoint, Knight Frank is able to speed its move from SharePoint 2007 to 2010 while reducing overall storage resource requirements and management overhead.

ClearPeople, a London-based Metalogix partner and SharePoint business solution specialist, worked with Knight Frank devising their SharePoint 2007 to 2010 strategy. The main challenges that the Knight Frank SharePoint team faced was the method by which best to manage content in a SharePoint 2010 environment and to bring across only business relevant documents from existing file shares and content already harnessed in SharePoint 2007. Knight Frank found the Metalogix StoragePoint Librarian solution to be the match in their strategy of incrementally moving only up-to-date documents from their file shares to SharePoint over an extended time period.

"The Metalogix product set covered all the bases of Knight Frank’s wisely formulated SharePoint strategy," said Gabriel Karawani, head of business solutions, ClearPeople. "Furthermore, it was very clear that the Metalogix products were by far the front-runner when investigating the global market place for suitable products".

Knight Frank LLP was founded in London in 1896. It Frank together with its New York-based affiliate Newmark Knight Frank, an independent global property consultancies. It has 207 offices in 43 countries, with staff of over 6,000. The group handled over $886 billion worth of commercial, agricultural and residential real estate in 2008-2009, advising clients ranging from individual owners and buyers to major developers, investors and corporate tenants.

The company relies on SharePoint as its company-wide collaboration and communication solution. Recently, the organization determined that it was time to migrate from its current SharePoint 2007 platform to SharePoint 2010 so that it could improve user productivity. The project, at first, seemed very daunting since Knight Frank had more than 700GB on a single content database. Even worse, the bloated database was causing backup problems and single document restores were very difficult to achieve. After evaluating point solutions from a few separate vendors, Knight Frank selected a suite of solutions from Metalogix for its feature set, common user interface and SharePoint integration. After implementation of StoragePoint began, their database has been reduced from 700GB to 48GB.  

"We needed a simplified solution to aid in our migration from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, while also enabling us to restore various items from the backup files," said James White, technical architect, Knight Frank. "Metalogix offered a comprehensive suite of solutions to help us reduce our database size and migrate our content to the new SharePoint version while also enabling us to restore individual files and documents for seamless data protection. Plus, they offered it all with the continuity of a common user interface from a single vendor that is renowned for its superior SharePoint integration capabilities."

For Knight Frank’s SharePoint content database, Metalogix StoragePoint externalizes SharePoint content Binary Large Objects (BLOBs), so that they may be stored on less expensive or more appropriate storage systems. This means their SQL clusters can be right-sized for optimal performance and the size of the SharePoint content database can be reduced while still maintaining critical metadata in the SQL Server SharePoint to ensure content is discovered and retrieved for ease of management within SharePoint.

Supporting Knight Frank’s migration from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, Metalogix Migration Manager for SharePoint uses a copy-and-paste-style user interface which allows the company to transparently migrate all SharePoint sites, libraries, lists, web parts and permissions between servers.

For those individual documents and list items stored in native SharePoint backups, Knight Frank will use Selective Restore Manager for SharePoint to simplify the process of restoring items, all without having to rebuild the entire product database or deploy a temporary SharePoint recovery farm. Now Knight Frank is able to connect directly to its native SQL Server backup files, and navigate them as though they were live SharePoint sites.

"For customers like Knight Frank, Metalogix offers the suite of SharePoint migration, management and data protection products they need to simplify and optimize their current environment while reducing the risks associated with critical content migrations, document restores and data protection," said Steven Murphy, CEO Metalogix. "We match the value of our solutions with world-class support services and the assurance of knowing that our products have been developed closely with Microsoft to adhere to their mandated SharePoint APIs so that integration is seamless and secure."