What to look for in a SharePoint Administration Product
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
