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
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We are using DocAve as well, and getting ready to purchase the Archiving module. I’m also a fan of buying only the portion you need. I have used several modules and I am hoping to have time to dive deeper into the capabilities as soon as our 2013 Dev environment is ready.
I will totally agree with this, We have Axceller and I have to bring down the whole farm whenever we have to do an upgrade. Totally invasive in that respect and there are many times that you cannot even tell if it is doing anything. Just have to wait and wait and wait. I would definitely take a hard look at DocAve. We are having this same issue with Metalogix Content Matrix also using for our migration to 2013, it installs on the sharepoint box where DocAve does not have to…. Bad enough the sharepoint servers can already be working hard…..
So Francios,
I work at World Wide Technology and we are in the middle of doing a POC with both products right now.
I can tell you my short answer: DocAve
Axceler is a great product too, but it’s a niche product, it’s not an entire Enterprise Management Solution, where DocAve is.
Want to refresh content from Prod to Test to Dev? Only Doc Ave Does it all.Â
Want to move content around, backup the destination before the action; Only DocAve Does.
You have Managed Meta Data to transfer around? Only DocAve moves MMD.
You want to do Granular Backup Restore? And use RBS? Â Only DocAve Does
The area where I’m still yet to test / score is User Permission Administration.
I can also tell you this, DocAve just installed, without any issue and it’s not installed into sharepoint.
Axceler had many many issues installing, I had to have their top support agent help us, and even then I had to figure out exactly how to resolve.
What I could do is post our scorecard when we’re done to this thread if it would help. I know our requirements won’t be everyone elses, but it would give you some idea.Â
P.S. Also – their Replicator product is a differentiator for us at WWT.Â
I was waiting for the “it depends” answer 🙂
Thanks for your feedback. Your comments are valid and valuable.
