GSX Solutions recently attended SharePoint conferences in Europe and the United States. We had the opportunity to speak with many individuals regarding their experiences with Microsoft SharePoint. As a result we've put together a list of common headaches that administrators experience on a day to day basis. Let's take a look below at the headaches, the questions that are being asked and what solution is needed for each.

Headache 1: Load-testing your environment
In deploying SharePoint within your company, you have to load-test your environment with various scenarios. Architects and administrators normally must use a load testing tool to see how their environment reacts with 2,000 users, 10,000 users, and so on.
But to get realistic load test results, you need to see how the service performs during actual usage. GSX enables you to test your environment without the need for additional tools, by simulating the impact of various numbers of users.

Headache 2: Anticipating capacity issues
Your SharePoint environment constantly evolves, as users upload documents, create sites, and update files.  Storage and site administration become a nightmare when administrators do not have a real-time view of their SQL environments, with the ability to track trends and forecast the future.
GSX provides administrators with all the important stats regarding their SQL environments. Moreover, GSX Analyzer enables even junior administrators to see trends over the past 2 weeks, the last 3 months, the past 2 years, and so on.
It takes only five minutes to configure reports, and automatically send them regularly to the appropriate parties.

Headache 3: Providing trusted data around the world
Many big companies have large SharePoint environments that require specific tools to replicate across the globe. In replicating data from site to site, you need to know that the indexer for every server across the world is performing its job, at the right time and with minimal mismatches.
GSX provides administrators with critical indexer alerts. Moreover, GSX tests for accuracy as a user of web services involved in the selection of the data, including versioning and search.

Headache 4: Enhancing your environment
Administrators face a number of day-to-day problems, in terms of performance, downtime, etc. Projects to improve the SharePoint user experience often require external resources, and a significant amount of time and money.
The question often arises: "How can I be sure you will improve the user experience if I can't measure it?"
GSX constantly tracks the user experience, giving administrators the real performance of their environment from a user perspective. With GSX, you can easily see if the changes you made improve the user experience. GSX tests SharePoint features from a user perspective on all the critical sites to give you, in real time, the time it takes users to access the sites and perform SharePoint actions.

Headache 5: Resource constraints
Skilled SharePoint architects and administrators are a scarce commodity.   You will want to use any SharePoint experts you have to improve your SharePoint environment and enhance its usefulness, improving your company's ROI. For that, you'll want GSX to automatically take care of the basic tasks like monitoring and reporting.
GSX is an out of the box tool that does not require any agent on the server. You install it, configure it in one hour, and let it run. The monitoring and reporting for your environment is taken care of, automatically, freeing your SharePoint experts to focus on your ROI.

Headache 6: Managing user complaints
SharePoint users often complain that the service is slow, that it doesn't work (because they don't know how to use it), and so on.
Sometimes users are right, even when you think they are wrong. Why?
Because users access SharePoint from outside your datacenter.. For example, even if it takes a user five minutes to upload a document, your system management tool may tell you that everything is fine.
GSX lets you constantly track the performance experience from the typical user's point of view. You can track for any SharePoint features or user actions, and the time it takes to perform them. This enables you to anticipate user complaints and availability issues, and justify system enhancements from the users' point of view. SLAs are automatically trended, KPI are monitored, and users are happy because GSX aligns your IT view with the user experience, and not the opposite.

Conclusion
From experience we know there are at least a few more administrator headaches than mentioned above, however these are some of the most common. What's important is that we do our best to minimize the amount of time we spend on each of these distractions, ensuring that our efforts are spent making improvements and adding features. As administrators we can certainly find a solution to each and every one of these problems, unfortunately however most require intense manual configuration and effort. It can be done but as you know, your time is better spent elsewhere.
At GSX we know what your headaches are, and how to fix these so you can focus on adding value for you organization. If you would like to find out how we can help take some of the burden away please visit our website, specifically the page of our flagship SharePoint monitoring and reporting solutions. Early next year we will propose on our website (www.gsx.com) 6 videos to demonstrate how GSX Solutions can solve these headaches for you.

GSX Solutions for SharePoint at a glance

• GSX Solutions captures the user experience giving you insight into the health and performance of your SharePoint environment from the user perspective
• GSX Solutions allows you to automate reporting of the key performance metrics
• Provide agentless and out-of-the-box deployment with no code installed on the servers you are monitoring.

About GSX Solutions
GSX Solutions is the global leader in proactive, consolidated monitoring, analysis and management of enterprise collaboration and messaging environments, including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Blackberry Enterprise Server and Lotus Domino, as well as LDAP and SMTP ports, and any URL. Monitoring millions of mailboxes for over 600 global enterprises, GSX is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with R&D in Nice, France, and offices in the UK and the US. Find out more on our website www.gsx.com

GSX were Sliver Exhibitors at the European SharePoint Conference 2011. Stay tuned for more information on the next European SharePoint Conference event and keep a look out for more content by joining our community or by following us on twitter or facebook.