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
GSX cures 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.
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
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