Summary:
This is a case study of the project performed by Y&L Consulting at the Argo Group for SharePoint 2007 to 2013 Migration and Performance Optimization.
Client Profile:
Argo Group International Holdings, Ltd. is an international underwriter of specialty insurance and reinsurance products in areas of the property and casualty market. Argo Group has offices in nine countries, including the UK, U.S., Brazil, Europe and the UAE.
Problem Statement:
Argo used SharePoint 2007 as a file storage and collaboration platform across various geographies. The employees in UK, used SharePoint for storing particularly large files (excess of 25 MB), and were experiencing very slow response times.
Argo also used SharePoint for status monitoring, workflows, forms etc, and wanted to take advantage of the new & advanced capabilities that SharePoint 2013 offers.
Y&L’s Solution:
Y&L performed a thorough analysis of the admin & backend reports from the network and SharePoint system and determined that the problems included, packet loss, latency due to geographical distance, and that the demand had far outgrown the capacity of the setup.
Y&L set up a traditional, local (to UK), three-tier SharePoint Server farm on three servers with roles distributed among the them.
The following diagram represents a simplified architecture of the SharePoint Farm:
DB Clustering was done to provide scalability and business continuity. Y&L also set up full and incremental backup, optimized crawling etc.
The following table shows the performance improvement that Argo experienced.
| Size | Upload Times | Download Times | ||
| Old | New | Old | New | |
| 10 MB | 30 sec | 3 sec | 22 sec | 1 sec |
| 20 MB | 46 sec | 8 sec | 35 sec | 2 sec |
| 50 MB | 120 sec | 15 sec | 101 sec | 3 sec |
For the SharePoint 2013 Migration, portion of the project, Y&L analyzed the master page and the 36 team sites in scope, and documented the various customizations, requested changes, custom web parts, and also identified downstream applications that would be impacted by the change.
Detailed planning and implementation followed the tests, after which the upgrade was rolled out to users across the UK.
The performance tuning and the migration was lauded by senior management and general users alike.
Y&L continued to provide maintenance and support function for the project over the next quarter building enhancements into the system.
