SharePoint Administration | Notes Administration

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.