Our credentialsCommittee of the Regions Hosting of sites on SharePoint
Committee of the Regions
Assembly of local and regional EU representatives
The Committee of the Regions, the voice of the European regions and cities, gathers together 350 members from all of the EU countries: regional presidents, mayors, and elected representatives. The Committee has been giving opinions and making propositions influencing the decision-making and legislative process of the EU since 1994. It’s main objective is to reconcile the expectations and the needs of EU citizens.
The challenge
Implementation of a stable hosting platform and a suite of services for the institution’s different SharePoint sites. This is done alongside the provision of application integration and the entirety of the web-hosting standards: availability, integrity, loading time, integration at an academic and social level.
The solution offered
At its origin, the project for the Committee of the Regions was based on dedicated hosting on a server farm of the institution’s website. In 2014 Actimage took over the management of these machines by integrating them into a new technical environment. Like every website in production, the major challenge was to shift the old one (for which the hosting contract was reaching its end) towards the new platform, without visible interruption, and while conserving the integrity of the current data.
Effective hosting
Today the site receives more than a million annual visits, with an availability rating near to 100% across the year.
An application migration
Following this success, and with its strong experience as an added-value integrator with Microsoft technology, Actimage and the Committee of the Regions are now working on the further development of this project, via an application migration from SharePoint Server 2010 to SharePoint Server 2016.
- Analysis of needs and environment migrations
- Environment optimisations and development recommendations
- Implementation of a hosting system capable of covering several million visits per month with an availability rating higher than 99.96% of the time
- Implementation of secured access to back-end features for developers and administrators, as well as application security against malicious access
- Implementation of monitoring of and reporting on the use of the application
The technology used
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Active Directory
- Microsoft SharePoint Server
- Zabbix
- VMWare
Quentin
Project adviser in infrastructure and systems
The web platform for the Committee of the Regions is their first line of communication, with world coverage. The challenge in this project was therefore to ensure the transition of their tools to our new platforms within reasonable deadlines and, above all, without interruption visible to visitors. With more than a million visitors per year, the site will soon have a new skin, with a more recent version of SharePoint. Our success as host for this website provides us with the opportunity to also become the integrator.
