Click the screen to launch a 15 min screencast about better SharePoint management with Axceler ControlPoint.

IT departments are embracing Microsoft SharePoint™ technology as a way to solve a host of business collaboration challenges. However, SharePoint farms can quickly become difficult to manage, as sites proliferate and become a nightmare for administrators. According to an 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 of the most common challenges SharePoint administrators face today include:

• no visibility into the performance of your SharePoint environment against your governance policies
• poorly managed permissions leading to security gaps
• uncontrolled growth of sites and site collections
• limited visibility into user activity
• depleted or poorly utilized SharePoint resources
• the need to centrally control users, sites, and site collections

Fig.: Axceler ControlPoint for SharePoint Management: Administration, Analysis, Reporting

• More control over the configuration and deployment of your SharePoint environment
• Ensure SharePoint security is properly set through permissions management, making sure that only the right eyes see the right content
• Quickly identify sites that do not comply with your governance policies so you can correct them
• Move/copy sites, site collections, lists and libraries within your farm or across farms
• Proactively manage your environment with alerts and scheduled analysis and actions
• Easily navigate to sites and perform any action or analysis
• Security trimmed architecture allows administrators to manage sites while only seeing what SharePoint permissions allow

Manage Permissions in SharePoint

• Perform a complete security analysis across your farm even down to the document level
• Set, delete, reassign, or duplicate user permissions
• Backup and restore permissions
• Manage SharePoint groups
• Clean up users who are no longer in Active Directory but are still in SharePoint
• Duplicate site permissions
• Monitor SharePoint CALs

Interactive Analysis and Reporting for SharePoint

• Interactive analysis, not just predefined or static reports
• Drill down or drill across to gain more detailed information
• Compare historic patterns and trends to better plan out your future requirements
• In-depth analysis and control of SharePoint Audit and Change logs

Analyze Usage and Activity in SharePoint

• Analyze activity down to the site, page, or document level
• Identify who is accessing which documents, including details on that activity (i.e. checking in a document, editing a document, or just viewing a document’s properties)
• Isolate sites that are no longer needed and delete them
• Compare activity from the past to help anticipate the future
• Find sites with the most or least activity

Manage SharePoint Content and Storage

• Monitor and track the growth of sites for better planning
• Analyze web part usage to determine which sites are using which web parts
• Management and control of SharePoint features
• Ensure consistent branding and behavior: site themes, quotas, regional settings, etc.

Proactive SharePoint Management

• Automatic alerts to critical changes in your environment
• Know immediately when a site is added or deleted or a site’s permission settings changes
• Enforce policies to maintain standards
• Schedule any analysis or action

Move or Copy SharePoint Content within Farms or Across Farms

• Move site collections, sites, lists, libraries, folders, and items
• Quickly go from test environment to production environment
• Reorganize your content as part of an architecture change, business change, or unanticipated growth

Efficient SharePoint Management

• Manage and control multiple sites, site collections, and web applications from one central location
• Lets administrators quickly and easily find sites to act upon
• Increase productivity with cross-site navigation and farm-wide administration
• Perform discovery/search functions across your SharePoint farm
• Scale to 10’s of thousands of sites
• Avoid training hassles with easy to use, consistent user interface

Find it and Fix it

• Analyze and then act immediately on results
• Avoid losing your context by switching between modules

Security Trimmed SharePoint Administration

• No additional security infrastructure to manage
• Leverage the security model you’ve already implemented in SharePoint

Distributed SharePoint Management

• Limit administrative functionality available to business managers or lower level administrators
• Option to integrate all management actions into SharePoint Site Settings
• Run reports from outside of ControlPoint to share with others
• Expose critical information in dashboards

Integrated with SharePoint

• Installs into your farm as a browser based web application
• Easily navigate to any site, site collection, or web application from within ControlPoint
• Access any SharePoint administrative capabilities like Site Settings and Central Administration from within ControlPoint

ControlPoint runs within your SharePoint environment on systems that meet the following requirements:

• Windows Server 2003, 2008, with IIS activated,
• SharePoint 2007 with WSS 3.0 installed (MOSS is optional)
• SQL Server 2005, 2008.
• Supports IE 6, 7 & 8.