5 Common Headaches for SharePoint Administrators
With its rapid spread and widespread use, Microsoft SharePoint obviously has many virtues. But, as with any powerful technology, there are a number of problem points. After polling some Axceler customers, we devised this list of five common headaches among SharePoint administrators and how ControlPoint can help.
Company Turnover Creates Permission Problems
The Headache: Turnover within the organization is not communicated to administrators leading to orphaned permissions. Correcting this problem is a labor intensive task requiring the manual review of each site, folder and file. Doing this process manually can require over a week of work. In one known case, this problem was only corrected after four employees dedicated four working days to fixing it.
The Solution:
- ControlPoint offers the ability to monitor the farm for changes in site, group, and user permissions.
- ControlPoint also offers the ability to dynamically produce a report of all permissions that users have across the entire SharePoint farm. This report can be regularly scheduled along with a scheduled backup of existing permissions. Thus restoring site permissions will become a far more manageable task.
Duplicating User Permissions
The Headache: The need to duplicate user permissions is a time consuming task. First the administrator must determine the user’s permission and then assign the same permission to the new user. Accomplishing this manually can require up to four days of concentrated effort.
The Solution:
- ControlPoint offers a single interface to immediately duplicate user permissions for all levels of SharePoint (e.g. farm wide, site collection, site, list, etc.). Using ControlPoint, this task is accomplished in minutes.
- ControlPoint also offers a single interface to immediately reallocate all user permissions from one user to another. This aids in allocating permissions for employee turnover. In seconds, ControlPoint can delete a user’s permissions and reassign them to the user who replaced him or her.
Difficulty Finding Existing Web Parts
The Headache: Identifying existing web parts and where they are located in the SharePoint farm is very resource intensive and often confusing. If it is known how and where the web parts are being used, the parts can be reused to address new business requirements. This reuse of web parts can greatly reduce development time and costs.
The Solution: ControlPoint generates reports of web parts and identifies exactly where they are used, its total size, and metadata about the creation and modified dates.
Moving SharePoint Sites
The Headache: Moving SharePoint sites is a complex task involving restoring the content databases to a new site. This complexity demands an extensive use of resources. In some cases, hiring contract workers is necessary.
The Solution: ControlPoint can copy, move and delete site collections, sites, lists/libraries, folders, and items. This can be performed inside one farm or from one server to another. This is especially helpful to move sites and content between development, staging, and production environments.
Installing Content Databases
The Headache: As the company grows, the installation of additional content databases may be required. Careful monitoring of this data is required to maintain system performance.
The Solution: ControlPoint can monitor the contents and size of your content databases. It also allows management of these databases and trending analysis for provisioning for additional resource requirements. This aids in capacity planning and allows you to reallocate storage among your content databases.