Hi everyone,
We are in the process of reviewing tools to assist with management of oour SharePoint environments.We are looking at a tool that can assist with the day-to-day management of the farm, sites, and content. What we also need is reporting on user access, implement setting accross sites/libraries (e.g. versioning etc.).
We have a relatively small farm, and let’s assume finances is not an issue. We also need good support, since we do not have the appetite or the resources to struggle with a 3rd party app when things goes pear-shaped.
We’ve had demo’s by both these parties, but I’d like to hear from “the people on the ground” 🙂
Sales people tell you all the nice tales, which is right, but I need an objective (well, as far as possible) view from the community. Your assistance and comments would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
Hello Francois,
If you are buying a tool for special purposes like RBS or migrations, it is reasonable to benchmark them or look at tech specs and buy modules. However, any product that you use for every-day admin tasks may be more trouble than it’s worth. There is no API that allows a third-party tool to take over the config database, so they have to keep the equivalent of their own.
For example, Axceler’s ControlPoint has to do a discovery of the content, which can impact performance. You need to factor that in. This is kind of like a crawl. It is only aware of the state of the farm through discovery, so you can’t depend on it making any changes unless it’s assessment of the farm is fresh. I was not impressed with the interface or the error reporting (2010).
In a production environment, I have only used DocAve for site restore and it was very confusing to the users. It’s no longer necessary. Found memory leaks and reported them to the vendor. They put out a hot fix the next day, so were very responsive. In any case, this would use an event receiver, so no discovery needed.
I liked Metalogix for migrations, but haven’t used it for a while (2003-2007). Again, special purpose, no crawl needed.
Get some specific stats on this from the vendors and find out when and how often they need to perform any kind of discovery operation for the admin operations that interest you.
Hope this helps-
Mary
