SharePoint Administration | Notes Administration

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.