About AmWINs
AmWINS Group, Inc. is the largest wholesale distributor of specialty insurance products and services in the U.S. AmWINS has expertise across a diversified mix of property, casualty, group benefits and reinsurance products. They also offer value-added services to support these products, including product development, underwriting, premium and claims administration and actuarial services.
The AmWINs Challenges
SimpleSharePoint was engaged by AmWINs to assist the firm with evaluating its SharePoint infrastructure including security of its systems and technology investments to better align them to the firm’s business goals. AmWINs had many SharePoint farms from legacy businesses and acquisitions. Counting staging and development farms there were over ten 10 separate farms in geo locations with a range of SharePoint versions. With a workforce of nearly 5,000 users it was vital to have careful change management in place.
What We Did
In May 2018 we performed planning and analysis via audits and assessments of the existing farms, web apps, external data sources, and code customization. We identified the areas of prime importance and determined what areas could be deprecated.
Next, we worked out service windows for patching and upgrading existing servers and farms in preparation for migration. We built a fresh SharePoint 2016 farm and did test migrations to identify third-party solutions and customizations. We migrated all existing data from various versions of SharePoint into a single robust SharePoint 2016 farm running on Windows 2016. Their backend SQL was configured in availability groups to insure high availability. A development area was also deployed for ongoing development & testing. Our process included weekly meetings, progress updates, careful mapping, and disciplined communication protocols throughout the migrations. The core upgrade was a success that went smoothly. Many department upgrades had zero business downtime, which made this process simple for all stakeholders.
The Result
SimpleSharePoint offers ongoing and proactive support to AmWINs through its Managed ServerCare plus solution. Through these services, SimpleSharePoint proactively is alerted to problems affecting AmWINs SharePoint systems and can quickly begin support and remediation. SimpleSharePoint now serves as AmWINs’ SharePoint partner, allowing the firm to shift focus to its core business. With this business model, AmWINs can continue to focus on growing its business and providing a high level of service to its clients.
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