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Axceler ControlPoint Named 2009 Editors’ Best Award Winner by Windows IT Pro Magazine

Axceler, the global leader in administration software for Microsoft SharePoint, today announced that its product ControlPoint was named as a gold medal winner of the "2009 Editors' Best Awards" in the Best SharePoint Product category by Penton Media's Windows IT Pro magazine. ControlPoint is the award-winning SharePoint administration product that gives SharePoint managers unprecedented control over the management of their SharePoint farms.

"The 2009 Editors' Best Awards are an accumulation of our editors', contributors' and authors' subject matter expertise, in service of identifying the year's most significant products in the market," said Michele Crockett, editorial strategy director. "We believe that our editorial experts' annual tradition of selecting winners based on a product's strategic importance to market, its competitive advantages and its value to the customer is particularly significant to the Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine communities this year, as we call out exceptional products in a highly competitive market.

"Our Editors' Best Awards allow us to take advantage of our contributing editors' in-the-trenches expertise in the Windows and SQL Server markets to provide well-earned recognition to products that exceed industry standards. We're proud to now share this invaluable insight with our Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine communities. Our winners should be extremely proud of this honor of recognition from our editorial experts."

Windows IT Pro Editor-in-chief Jeff James praised Axceler ControlPoint's SharePoint permissions management, content management, in-depth usage analysis, policy enforcement, and flexible alerts and scheduled analyses. With this comprehensive set of tools, "Axceler ControlPoint helps IT pros get better control of their SharePoint environment." Contributing editor Curt Spanburgh said ControlPoint "integrates well with the existing SharePoint UI" and the ability to manage permission levels was "nicely implemented." He concluded "ControlPoint provides the tools and intelligence to help you manage and monitor large farms effectively."

The award is the second garnered by ControlPoint since version 3 was launched in April, 2009. In May, the product was named the Best of TECH•ED 2009 in the Productivity and Collaboration category.

"We've worked hard at listening to our customers and giving them the best product possible," said Mike Alden, President and CEO of Axceler, "And it's wonderful to be recognized for delivering on that promise."

About ControlPoint
Axceler ControlPoint gives you the ability to explore, protect, analyze and control your SharePoint environment and helps you measure the performance of your SharePoint environment against your governance policies. Axceler ControlPoint includes comprehensive permissions management, in-depth activity and storage analysis, and SharePoint policy enforcement. Axceler ControlPoint also gives you more control over the configuration and deployment of your SharePoint environment and you can manage content databases, features, and SharePoint groups.

About Axceler
Since 1994, Axceler has helped enterprises address common yet critical administrative and development challenges, so organizations can maximize collaborative technology investments, improve business operations, and dramatically reduce administrative time and costs. For Microsoft SharePoint, Axceler delivers ControlPoint, which gives administrators the ability to explore, protect, analyze, and ultimately control their SharePoint environments. Based in Woburn, MA, Los Angeles, CA, and London, UK, Axceler can be found at www.axceler.com. More information about Microsoft SharePoint administration is available on the ControlPoint home page.

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Press Contact:

Ken Allen
ken.allen@axceler.com
781-995-0071

Copyright 2009, Axceler. Axceler and Axceler ControlPoint are registered trademarks. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

ControlPoint Reviewed by Windows IT Pro

Earns four out of five stars

"Has strong tools for managing large deployments"

Axceler is pleased to announce its SharePoint administration tool ControlPoint earned high marks in a recent review in trade publication Windows IT Pro. In the review, ControlPoint received praise in helping administrators manage larger deployments.

Among other features, reviewer Curt Spanburgh found the ability to move sites and site collections within ControlPoint "very helpful." He noted the "robust" alerting system made him aware of "urgent issues like deleted sites and broken security inheritance" immediately.

Spanburgh also liked ControlPoint's ability to find and report 'orphaned users' (users who have content access rights but have been disabled or removed from AD) and the "comprehensive" site reports. Further, ControlPoint's "ability to manage user permission levels is nicely implemented."

According to the review, ControlPoint's interface "integrate[d] well with the existing SharePoint user interface." And while the "intuitive" ControlPoint interface allows new administrators to perform important operations, ControlPoint also has powerful functionality that can only be fully realized by experienced SharePoint administrators.

Find out what Axceler ControlPoint can do for your organization by calling our sales line at 866-499-7092 or try it yourself by downloading a free evaluation copy.

Read the full Windows IT Pro review

ControlPoint by Axceler Named “Best of TECH·ED 2009 Awards Winner by WINDOWS IT PRO and SQL SERVER MAGAZINES

WOBURN, MA - May 18, 2009 -Axceler, the global leader in administration software for collaborative platforms, today announced that its SharePoint Administration product, ControlPoint, was named as the Winner in the Best of Tech•Ed 2009 awards program in the Productivity and Collaboration category by Penton Media's Windows IT Pro® and SQL Server Magazine®.

The Best of Tech•Ed 2009 Awards recognize companies who offer innovative products for the industry. The judges reviewed more than 170 products and services submitted for the contest and chose 35 finalists to be interviewed at the Tech•Ed 2009 IT Pro Conference in Los Angeles, Calif. Winners were announced on May 13, 2009, at an evening reception and are also posted on http://www.WindowsITPro.com/awards.

"Every year, selecting winners from the outstanding pool of highly qualified nominations is challenging, with this year's submissions no exception," said Jeff James, IT Group editor in chief and web content strategist. "Our judging criteria - innovation, strategic importance to the market, competitive advantage and exceptional value to customers - are clearly reflected in the winners' products."

"We are thrilled to win this prestigious award out of such a large group of vendors," said Mike Alden, President and CEO of Axceler. "Since its launch, customer response to ControlPoint has been terrific and this award validates our strategy to help facilitate the growth of SharePoint within enterprises."

About ControlPoint

ControlPoint gives you the ability to explore, protect, analyze and control your SharePoint environment. Specifically, ControlPoint helps you gain better control through comprehensive permissions management, in-depth activity and storage analysis, SharePoint content management, governance policy enforcement, and proactive management with alerts and notifications.

About Axceler

Since 1994, Axceler has improved the effectiveness of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino and Microsoft SharePoint administration. Based in Woburn, MA, and London, UK, Axceler can be found at www.axceler.com. More information about SharePoint administration is available on our blog or on the ControlPoint home page.

Axceler Launches ControlPoint 3 for Microsoft SharePoint Administration

New Features Include Proactive Alerting, Moving Sites, and Scheduled Analysis

WOBURN, MA - April 27, 2009 - Axceler, the global leader in administration software for collaborative platforms, today announced ControlPoint 3, the newest version of the fastest growing SharePoint administration product for Microsoft SharePoint. ControlPoint 3 delivers new capabilities so you can be proactive about your SharePoint administration, including alerting, moving sites, policy management, and scheduled analysis.  Experts say that the best way to avoid future problems is by thinking ahead and putting a solid, best-of-breed SharePoint infrastructure in place.  ControlPoint 3, as part of that infrastructure, can help you avoid the impact as well as the costs of violating your governance policies.  ControlPoint 3 is the only administration software that seamlessly lets you analyze and enforce SharePoint permissions, analyze activity storage and content, clean up user accounts, move content within farms or between farms, enforce policies and audit SharePoint environments. 

Top Five Reasons to Look at a SharePoint Administration Tool

Top 5 Reasons to Look at a SharePoint Administration Tool

1- You Can Manage Permissions
ANALYZE PERMISSIONS DOWN TO THE DOCUMENT LEVEL
Because SharePoint's permissions management is limited, the tool you select should ensure that permissions are set properly by evaluating user permissions at any point in the SharePoint farm, even down to the document level. Additionally, you should have the power to do a complete security analysis, including whether the user has been granted permission as part of a group or by having direct permissions. It should be easy to analyze what a user has access to, or alternately, you should be able to investigate permissions from the site perspective. For example, you should be able to find all sites where a user has specific permissions level like Administrator.

ENFORCE PERMISSIONS FOR ALL USERS
The management tool you selSaveect should let you easily manage permissions settings across the farm all at once. Instead of going into sites one by one, you'll want the ability to perform your permissions activity on multiple sites, saving significant amount of time, especially if your personnel changes frequently.

Set Permissions - Setting permissions should be easy, either directly or through a group membership. It should be flexible to work at the site, site collection, web application or even at the entire farm level. Advanced tools also let you specify custom permissions levels and permissions should be additive to retain the existing permissions levels.

Delete Permission - Deleting permissions should apply to both users as well as groups of users. When you delete permissions, they should be deleted from all sites, all groups in which they are listed as a member as well as web application policies. And, you should have the option of deleting a user from the site's All People list.

Reassign Permissions - As part of the process of deleting a user's permissions, you should be able to re-assign those permissions to someone else. For example, if an administrator changes jobs or leaves, you might want to reassign that user's permissions to another administrator.

Duplicate Permissions - Duplicating permissions makes it really easy to manage a dynamic SharePoint environment. If you have a "model" user in a department and a new user is added to the department, you should be able to easily, in one step, ensure that the new user is granted access to all the appropriate sites. This should work on a single user as well as a group of users all at once.

2 - You Can Manage User Accounts
With regard to user accounts, you'll want the ability to easily clean up accounts by deleting users from all permissions when they are no longer in Active Directory.

Find orphan users - Ideally, you can run an analysis that finds all users in SharePoint that are not in Active Directory anymore - even those users that have been marked as "inactive" in Active Directory.

Remove User Permissions - With a single click, you should be able to remove user's permissions from all sites, files, groups, etc. Also, when users are removed from SharePoint, you should be able to easily delete users from all permissions.

3 - You Can Evaluate SharePoint Usage
A SharePoint management tool should let you analyze all aspects of the usage of your farm. You should be able to look into the activity - who is accessing what; the growth of the number of sites, how much storage key sites use, find sites that are using the most storage, and even determine where Web Parts are being used.

ISOLATE SITES THAT ARE NO LONGER NEEDED AND DELETE THEM
How important to you are sites that have no activity over a period of time - or sites that only one user is accessing? With the right tool, you can analyze both the activity and the storage used on any sites so you can determine how important those sites are to your enterprise. It's not uncommon to setup a site or set of sites for a particular project but they are no longer needed after the project finished. How do you know when the project is completed? Are those sites now sitting dormant? Maybe there are sites that users thought they needed but then never used. What about sites using the most storage? You should be able to easily analyze both your site activity and storage to get a better picture of what's going on.

DETERMINE WHO IS ACCESSING WHICH DOCUMENTS
What better way to determine what information is valuable in your environment than by monitoring user activity? With the right tool it's easy to determine exactly who is accessing which documents. You'll want to be able to see all the users that are accessing each document or see all the documents a particular user has accessed. Maybe you need to determine whether one of the biggest documents on a site is really valuable. With the right tool, you can see who has been looking at it.

FIND SITES WITH THE MOST ACTIVITY OR LEAST ACTIVITY OR STORAGE
Ever wonder which sites are getting the most activity? Or how about which sites get no use at all? Maybe it's time to re-organize or cleanup your sites. You should be able to analyze the activity at any level in the SharePoint hierarchy, including pages, documents or across disparate web applications. An activity analysis should tell you the total number of requests for the period you're analyzing, as well as the average users per day, the size and the quota. A page activity analysis should tell you the top pages, who's been accessing them and where they came from.

ANTICIPATE GROWTH OF YOUR FARM BY MONITORING THE GROWTH OF SITES, STORAGE AND ACTIVITY
As your users become more familiar with SharePoint, the usage of your environment will naturally grow. You should keep track of your site growth as well as your site usage, including the growth of storage and the activity on sites, site collections or web applications so you can manage this growth accordingly. You'll should get detailed information on your SharePoint environment so you can perform a historic analysis for any period of time, giving you the insight to anticipate the needs of your users and to get a better handle on how your SharePoint farm is performing.

WEB PART USAGE
Before making a change to any web part, you should know which sites are using it. Unfortunately, with SharePoint, there isn't any place to go for that information. Third party tools can help provide an analysis of web part usage so you can identify which sites are using each web part, as well as all the web parts being used by each site. Details like when the web part was created, modified, last updated, size and more can go a long way to help manage your environment.

4 - You Can Ensure Consistent Branding and Behavior
Look for a tool that lets you ensure brand consistency and behavior across your farm by maintaining control over your site themes, site collection administrators, quotas, and regional settings across any number of sites or site collections all at once. Choose a tool that will make it easy to ensure the sites used by a local team have the same time zone setting, or will let you setup the quota for all your site collections across the farm all at once. The ability to set properties on Sites and Site Collections will give you the tools to allow you to ensure your farm is controlled how you want it to be.

5 - You Gain Perspective
The right tool will, simply put, help you gain perspective on your environment. You'll want something intuitive and comfortable that you can use day to day to make your SharePoint management smooth and hassle free. Think of it as a framework that lets you see, explore and manage your entire farm and helps you easily maintain your inventory of sites automatically. Make sure to find one that lets you search meta data, the information about your sites, so you can quickly identify problem sites, sites close to quota, and so on. You'll most likely want to be able to narrow your scope based on a particular criteria, such as site template, date created, permission levels, or number of files just to name a few. Such ad hoc discovery can give you plenty of flexibility, especially when you combine search criteria, so you spend far less time investigating and analyzing sites in your farm.

Summary

Hopefully we were able to provide some guidance in what to look for in add-on tools that manage Microsoft SharePoint. But now that you know more about what to look for, hopefully your search is a little more focused. Remember, the sooner you begin to think about administration tools, the better off you'll be. Smart administrators build a plan for management before their environment gets big and difficult to control. Armed with these points about SharePoint management tools, you are now ready to make an informed decision on SharePoint management tools.

What to look for in a SharePoint administration Tool

Information technology departments are embracing Microsoft SharePoint as a simple answer to a host of business information problems. However, SharePoint farms can quickly become difficult to manage, as sites proliferate and become a nightmare for administrators. According to a recent article in CMS Watch, "Unfortunately, as you grow very large SharePoint environments, the controls that enterprises would want to see simply don't exist natively within the platform."

Some enterprises may opt to wait until their deployment is 100% complete before thinking about ongoing administration. However, in our experience, that could be a costly mistake. The sooner you begin to think about administration tools, the sooner you can begin saving time, money, and headaches later on down the road.
Because a SharePoint management tool can have a huge impact on your environment and your organization, you'll want to know what to look for in a third-party product. In this article we will cover the main things to look for when looking at a SharePoint administration tool.

Manage Across Multiple Sites
Since native SharePoint administration functions only operate at the individual site level, any decent SharePoint management tool should let you perform management functions across multiple sites or site collections, web applications or across the entire farm. This helps lower the cost of ownership and the time it takes to manage SharePoint by drastically saving time and effort on a day to day basis. For example, suppose you adjusted a quota template, and need to apply that updated template to 100 site collections. Using Central Admin, it would take an average of 35 seconds for each site collection, for a total of nearly an hour. However, if you use an administration tool, that operation on those same 100 sites can be performed in 11 seconds - you just saved yourself 58 minutes.
The more advanced tools out there will let you choose exactly which sites to perform analysis and actions on - for example, you can see if a particular user has permissions to access sites that are in different site collections or even different web applications.

Find it and Fix it
Since much of a SharePoint administrator's time involves the day to day management of their environment, the best tools out there will help identify problems and then provide an easy path to fix them. There's nothing more tedious than running a report or a search to identify a problem, then going through a million cumbersome steps to then fix the problem. For example, suppose you did an analysis to see who has permissions to a set of sites. To change those permissions, you'll want to be able to do it from the analysis immediately, so you can move on to other things.

Security Trimmed
Since you've already setup a security infrastructure, you want to make sure your management tool leverages it instead of creating a new infrastructure to add to your headaches. Site administrators should only be able to see and manage the sites they have access to, just as site collection administrators should only see and manage the sites they have access to. Not all management tools are completely security trimmed, so make sure to look for it because with it you can leverage the security infrastructure you've put in place and you avoid any additional security configuration and management.

Extend Your Team
As sites grow and multiply in your organization, you might want the ability to extend your administration team across your enterprise before you get too bogged down in administrative tasks. The SharePoint management tool you select should therefore let you distribute responsibility according to your organizational needs so that other business managers and site administrators can manage their own sites and site collections. This way, they can just manage permissions without being overwhelmed with advanced functions they don't need or understand, while a central administrator can retain control. Therefore, along with the security trimming, you should be able to limit the functionality available to business managers or lower level administrators.

Leverage the Administrative Power of SharePoint
Since SharePoint already comes out of the box with some pretty valuable administration capabilities, it is important that any SharePoint management tool you choose work with them, not against them, allowing you to access what you need when you need it, not requiring you to switch between SharePoint and your management tool. You want a tool that let's you access those SharePoint management functions from within that tool. That way, you can navigate to any site, site Collection, web application or even a group or a list and then launch the familiar SharePoint management functions - like Site Settings or Central Administration functions like "Define Managed Paths" or "Web Application General Settings."

Dynamic Analysis & Reporting
Like most things in an enterprise, SharePoint environments are never static, changing every day and in some cases, every minute. Your analysis and reporting tools should be just as dynamic, and should give you the ability to quickly uncover what is really going on so that you can fix it and move on. Ideally, a reporting tool will produce interactive / live results, so you have the option to drill down and across your results instantly. Suppose you want to perform a permissions analysis on a site. Based on your results, you decide you want to further explore the permissions of specific lists and libraries within that site. Or suppose you want to explore which sites a user has access to. After seeing the list, you decide you want to see who else has access to a particular site. With an interactive tool, you can. Static reports may do a great job of providing a snapshot in time, but for real in-depth administration, dynamic, interactive analysis is much more powerful and definitely the way to go.

Axceler Launches ControlPoint™ Comprehensive Administration for Microsoft SharePoint

Most Powerful Parametric Search, Analysis and Control for SharePoint Administrators

Orlando, FL - April 21, 2008 - Axceler, the global leader in administration and development software for collaborative platforms, today announced the availability of ControlPoint, a comprehensive administration tool to manage Microsoft SharePoint environments. ControlPoint gives administrators the ability to search, analyze and ultimately control their SharePoint environments so they can help restore order before their environment gets out of control. ControlPoint will be unveiled for the first time at Axceler's booth #303 during SharePoint Connections, April 20-23 in Orlando, FL.

ControlPoint brings a number of benefits to an enterprise. First, administrators can visualize all the components of their SharePoint environment so they can navigate quickly and easily. Second, ControlPoint can establish better control through permissions management, making sure that only the right eyes see the right content. ControlPoint also gives administrators the ability to analyze and enforce governance policies they've put in place, enabling administrators to quickly identify non-compliant sites within their SharePoint environment and correct them. ControlPoint also provides the ability to search across the entire environment to identify potential problems with particular sites, like those close to quota or those with unique permissions. Finally, ControlPoint's security trimmed architecture allows administrators to manage, navigate, and search while only seeing what SharePoint permissions allow.

"ControlPoint is a big help in the day-to-day management of SharePoint. The intuitive, tree-oriented navigation helps me set properties on each site. Its comprehensive search lets me find sites I need to address, and the reports let me easily share my analysis with my management team to assist in their governance of SharePoint," said Andrew Watts, IT Manager, L-3 Communications.

ControlPoint honors SharePoint permissions, so all analysis, navigation, search and reports are security trimmed. ControlPoint is the first to deliver robust parametric site search for SharePoint - some of the most powerful available - so the search is quick, parameter based, and focused on the unique needs of administrators. ControlPoint leverages native SharePoint administration functions whenever possible and appropriate. Other products may force administrators to switch between multiple applications, whereas ControlPoint lets administrators find it and fix it, saving both time and energy.

"Axceler has been working with administrators for many years, so we have a solid understanding of what they need in a product to be effective in their jobs," said Michael Alden, President and CEO, Axceler, "SharePoint administrators tell us they need better control, tighter security, and complete awareness of what's going on in their environment. We are excited at the opportunity to bring our knowledge and expertise to the Microsoft SharePoint platform."

About Axceler

Axceler is the leading provider of administration and development products for collaborative platforms, including Microsoft SharePoint. Axceler empowers enterprises to address common yet critical administrative and development challenges so firms can maximize their collaborative technology investments, improve business operations, and reduce administrative time and costs. Axceler serves more than 2,000 customers around the globe in a wide range of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, consumer products, healthcare, business services, publishing, utilities, telecom, government, and high technology. More info on Axceler can be found at http://www.axceler.com