In this article, I’m am going to introduce you to some of the features of Nintex Workflow 2007 (NW), and show you why I think this is a really cool product. I’ll also tell you about some of the annoyances I found.

Full Disclosure: Now, I’m trying to be as unbiased as I can and give you my honest opinion, but you should know that I was paid by Nintex for creating the USP Journal issue. No, they didn’t get any editorial control, but I was still paid. As such, feel free to hold a salt shaker ready and take what I say with an appropriate grain of salt.

Nintex Workflow in a Nutshell

Basically, Nintex is an easy to use workflow add-on to SharePoint. If you have worked with workflow in SharePoint before, chances are you have either worked with SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio. Both of these options are well suited for their intended use, but there is a big gap between SPD and VS that NW fills really well.

On one side, SharePoint Designer offers an incredibly easy and free way of adding simple workflows to a SharePoint site. Using a bit of creativity you can even create fairly complex solutions, using only the built-in actions and features. However, SharePoint Designer lacks scalability and flexibility, and re-use is at best very cumbersome.

On the other side is Visual Studio, which is like having your own thermo nuclear device. It’s incredibly powerful and you can more or less control at least parts of the world, but you had better know exactly what you are doing, or you risk your solution blowing up in your face. Where Visual Studio offers immense power, its learning curve is so steep, it can scare the most die-hard mountaineer.

Nintex Workflow bridges the gap between these two solutions, by giving end users some of the power of a Visual Studio solution while maintaining the ease of use and gentle learning curve of SharePoint Designer. In addition, NW includes some truly unique features, such as the ability to combine sequential and state-machine workflows and user interaction with tasks through email in a feature that deserves mention for its name alone: LazyApproval.

Authoring Workflows in Nintex

What initially sparked my interest for NW was the interface for designing workflows. The interface resembles the workflow designer in Visual Studio in that you get a visual overview of the ‘flow’ part of your workflow. Branching, loops, and state machines are presented in what I think is a really intuitive interface that makes it easy for end users to understand what is going on.

What makes this workflow designer especially friendly to end users is that it resides inside SharePoint itself. Using scripting and more fancy scripting than I’d dare to undertake, you are actually designing your entire workflow right inside SharePoint with no client software to install or learn at all. You simply drag-and-drop actions from the action menu onto the designer surface and configure each action using dialog boxes.

True, the interface of the Visual Studio workflow designer offers more options and allows for a greater degree of flexibility, but Visual Studio is still an all-or-nothing package; if you want the added flexibility, you also need to deal with the added complexity. That complexity is probably far more than any end users are prepared to handle.

Templates and Snippets

Another nice feature is the ability to easily create templates of existing workflows. You can create the generic templates for common tasks such as approval or customer follow-up and then re-use the templates when creating new workflows. This saves a lot of time if you are creating similar workflows or have common tasks used by several units in an organization.

Another option for workflow re-use is snippets. A snippet is basically a set of workflow actions stored as a single action. You create these snippets in the workflow designer, and they become part of your available actions for use in any workflow. For example, you might create a snippet to notify an item or document owner about changes to that item or document. Whenever you want to include that functionality in your workflow, you simply drag the entire snippet onto the workflow designer, and you get that functionality added without having to re-create all the individual actions.

Go with the Flow

If there is one thing I really miss, especially in SharePoint Designer workflows, it is better debugging and tracking of what is going on. A common approach is to add a lot of history logging to track what the workflow is doing. In Visual Studio, you can attach the debugger and step through the entire workflow, which is really nice and gives developers extreme control.

While NW lacks the stepping option, it does offer a very nice workflow information page far superior to the default workflow status page of SharePoint. On that workflow information page, you get a visual representation of your workflow, including which actions and branches are currently executing.

This workflow information page can also give you a detailed view where you can get a whole boatload of more information about the workflow execution, including how long each action takes, the outcome of conditions, who approves or disapproves which actions, and a range of other information.

The workflow information provided by NW goes a long way towards providing the debugging information you need to figure out workflow bottlenecks, logical errors, and other problems you may encounter.

State of the Machine

The final thing I want to point out as truly unique in NW is the support for state machines. You may wonder what is so special about supporting state machines, after all, most workflow products support state machines in some fashion.

What is really nice in NW, though, is that a state machine is simply an action, just like any other multi-branch action. This means you can combine state machines with sequential workflows inside the same workflow. For example, you may have a long running customer follow-up process, in which one part of the workflow consists of contract negotiations. That contract negotiation may move back and forth between different states, but is still only part of a longer workflow in which the ultimate goal is to make the customer happy.

In NW, you can simply add a state machine action and configure that action as you would if you had developed a stand-alone state machine workflow. Then, after that part of the workflow completes, you can continue in a sequential workflow, or even transition into a new state machine inside the same workflow.

OK, So What’s the Catch?

Alright, I’ve said enough about the cool things, so it makes sense to point out some of the weaknesses as well. Note that most of these issues are annoyances at worst.

First, the interface for controlling configuration scopes leave a lot to be desired. Basically, you can configure settings for sites and site collections, and the scopes control inheritance and all that, but the way that Nintex has solved the interface is not good. You need to pay attention to small pieces of texts on the page to know whether you are configuring for a site or for the entire site collection.

Second, NW supports setting up holidays to avoid workflow activities while no one is available to respond to tasks or interact with the workflow. However, the way the holidays are configured could have been done so much better. You can only add one day at a time, so if you are closing the office for two weeks during summer you need to add each day of those weeks individually. Really sad for schools with months of vacation at a time.

Third, the workflow designer can become cluttered when you are creating complex workflows, especially when using multiple branches. The branches keep expanding horizontally and will eventually fill any screen size if you have enough branches. And frankly, ‘enough’ branches is too low a number for example in state machines with many states. The same applies to the workflow information; to get an overview, you need to do a lot of scrolling. A “zoom out” function would be useful.

None of these issues are deal-breakers, though. It feels to me like they have gone 95% of the way towards making a perfect workflow solution, but with a product like this, the last 5% can be annoying.

And still, their 95% are still light-years ahead of anything else I have seen in this niche.

Want to Learn More?

The state machine image above is an example from the USP Journal I mentioned in the beginning of this article. In that issue, you’ll learn how to develop workflows in Nintex Workflow. The image shows part of a “get well card” that you’ll develop during the exercises in the issue. I’ll show you how to install and configure NW, familiarize you with the Workflow Designer, teach you at least some of the actions available, as well as explain the logic of how various tasks are done, such as the above example of inline state machines.

You can get the 128-page issue from the issue download page, and as I said, it’s free, as in beer.

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Visual Fusion, from IDV Solutions, a Microsoft Gold ISV Partner, provides a platform for managing many types of geospatial content and for creating applications that display enterprise data and Web feeds on a Virtual Earth map.  Visual Fusion brings location intelligence to SharePoint, creating a platform to build highly visual composite applications.

It solves the problem of uniting data from incompatible sources and systems, and it allows users without DBA or GIS expertise to quickly build mash-ups, while providing the tools for IT professionals to build robust applications.

Organizations in fields as diverse as border security and natural gas production currently use Visual Fusion to visualize their data in meaningful ways, so that users can make better informed decisions in less time.

Visual Fusion and SharePoint

Visual Fusion exploits SharePoint infrastructure for site building, user authentication, search, and content management.  On top of these, IDV has layered custom Web parts and the ability to geo-enable SharePoint content.

Visual Fusion Experience (VFX), the client component of Visual Fusion Suite, is a browser-based rich Internet application (RIA), implemented on a SharePoint site using Web parts. A JavaScript API allows developers to customize and extend this interface.

Visual Fusion Server (VFS) is implemented as a set of SharePoint Features and packaged as a SharePoint Solution. It includes data connectors, a styling engine, and tools for data filtering.

Together, VFS and VFX allow enterprises to:

• Manage and integrate content
• Build applications
• Deliver a feature-rich user experience.

Managing geospatial content

Geospatial data can come in many formats (.shp, GeoRSS, KML and more), from multiple sources (Web feeds, GIS departments, enterprise databases and workgroup spreadsheets). Many enterprises lack a convenient way to share these among work areas or to combine them with other data.

Using SharePoint to manage this diverse content makes it available throughout the enterprise. Visual Fusion Server supplies SharePoint templates for creating custom lists and libraries. These templates include Visual Fusion’s geocoding function; for items with a valid address but no latitude and longitude, VFS automatically retrieves the coordinates from Web services. Through MOSS Excel services, Visual Fusion extends this content management and geocoding functionality to data in Excel spreadsheets.

VFS automatically retrieves coordinates from Web services.

Custom libraries built from the Visual Fusion templates house GeoRSS, KML and .shp files; custom lists house links to GeoRSS, KML or WMS Web feeds. Users can apply the VFS templates and geocoding retroactively to existing SharePoint lists and libraries.

VFS libraries house GeoRSS, KML and Shapefiles.

VFS can also connect to data sources outside SharePoint. Connectors are available to access data through the Business Data Catalog, and to connect to SQL Server, Oracle, ArcSDE and MapPoint databases. Developers can also write their own connectors using the Visual Fusion SDK.

Building applications

Visual Fusion applications are built in SharePoint sites, using custom Web parts. One of these, the Composer, is a drag-and-drop interface for adding data layers to an application and styling them. The Composer discovers and lists all the available data layers, in SharePoint and outside it. A user can drag these layers into a hierarchy, creating groups that expand and collapse, and selecting colors, icons, line styles and other visual attributes.

The user can also enter a URL directly into the Composer to create a layer for a GeoRSS or WMS feed. Using the Composer, the layer hierarchy for a new application can be composed from existing data sources in as little as 20 minutes.

The Composer lets users build applications by dragging layers into a hierarchy.

Site administrators and similar users can customize applications further by editing configuration files. Options that they can configure include filters, data transformations, and style rules.

If an enterprise has needs beyond the out-of-the box VFS features, developers can use the SDK to write custom data connectors, request handlers, filters, style rules, and geocoders.

This application, created with the Visual Fusion SDK, generates contour lines on the fly
from a set of points where the elevation was measured.

The RIA interface

The end user interface, Visual Fusion Experience, is a rich internet application composed of two Web parts, a map viewer and a layer control.

Visual Fusion Experience is a rich internet application composed of Web parts.

Map Viewer

The map viewer provides users with a set of tools that include:

• pan and zoom
• location search
• time zone viewer
• distance measure
• latitude and longitude display for the cursor position
• inset map for overviews and close-ups
• timeline viewer
• spatial query tool
• drawing tools

The timeline tool filters databases and Web feeds based on time and date. It’s an interactive filter that lets users step through days, months or other time periods, watching the data on the map change over time.

The interactive timeline filters data based on date and time.

The spatial query tool lets end users draw an area on the map, and send all the data points within that area to a form or other Web part. Using the drawing tools, end users can annotate the map with points, lines, and polygons, include metadata for each item, and then save this annotation in SharePoint.

The map viewer is configured through the SharePoint user interface, and any of these tools can be disabled at any time through the Web part configuration.

Layer Control

End users turn map layers off and on using the layer control. Like the map viewer, this Web part includes a set of tools that are configurable through the SharePoint UI:

• The Enterprise Search tool uses a custom search scope, and displays search results as data points on the map.
• A configurable set of buttons lets the end user enter URLs directly into the layer control to display GeoRSS, KML or WMS feeds along with the existing data layers.

The layer control also incorporates a details panel, which can be configured to display more information about any data point, line, or polygon that a user selects on the map. The content and formatting of this details panel can be stored in a calculated column in SharePoint.

The Details Panel can be configured to display more information about items on the map.

Extending the interface

Developers can extend this user interface further. Through the JavaScript API, the map viewer and layer control can be configured to communicate with third-party Web parts. For example, a developer can configure the interface so that clicking on a map item causes data or charts associated with the item to display in a third Web part. Or an application can be set up so that, when the end user selects a map region with the spatial query tool, the map viewer launches a request and sends the query results to a data grid or form Web part.

Leveraging SharePoint Capabilities

The underlying SharePoint infrastructure makes it possible to create new Visual Fusion applications quickly. It also makes it easy to create multiple applications that leverage the same data sources. SharePoint features that Visual Fusion uses include:

• Excel Services, for creating map layers from spreadsheets
• Search, including enterprise search scopes
• BDC, for connecting to data sources
• Role-based authentication for security down to the list item level
• List and library templates for content management
• Web parts for a flexible user interface

For more information about Visual Fusion, go to www.idvsolutions.com

Microsoft is doing a good job of providing SharePoint developers and partners with timely information about the system. A good example is the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog. In the last few months, a number of useful new information sources have been added. A good example are the “Advanced SharePoint Videos and Whitepapers” located here or via MSDN search.

SharePoint ships with a workable search system, which I’ll refer to as ESS, for Enterprise Search System. It makes excellent use of the metadata for each document processed by the system. In addition, Microsoft has reduced the time and complexity of customizing result pages, handling content on Microsoft Exchange servers, and accessing most standard file types.

In our tests of SharePoint, ESS does a good job and offers some bells and whistles not available in other enterprise search systems. For example, you can identify the individual whose content suggests an author is knowledgeable about a specific topic. Managing crawls or standard index cycles boils down to pointing and clicking. SharePoint is security aware, and administrators don’t have to fiddle with configuration files for most customization jobs.

The one barrier that SharePoint licensees encounter is the system’s “glass ceiling” when indexing upwards of 30 million documents. Microsoft purchased Fast Search & Transfer in January 2008 in order to provide a solution for SharePoint licensees who want to index and update 30 million or more documents without experiencing system slowdowns. Microsoft has released a Fast Search Web part to make integration of the FAST Enterprise Search Platform or ESP easier. The SharePoint FAST ESP Web part is here.

But licensing Fast ESP can easily soar above $250,000, excluding customizing and integrating service fees. Add to this cost hardware, and you have a major investment to make in order to deliver acceptable search-and-retrieval functionality for large, disparate document collections.

What can a SharePoint licensee do to handle larger document collections, reduce index update latency, and deliver point-and-click search functions quickly and for less money?

If you have a document collection that is nosing toward 50 million documents, maybe even higher, you need a search system now. The good news is that there are numerous solutions available. These range from open source options such as Lucene and FLAX to the industrial-strength Autonomy IDOL (intelligent data operating layer), which can cost $300,000 or more before support and maintenance fees are tacked on.

Reasons to Switch from Microsoft’s ESS

Third-party systems can reduce the time required to index new and changed documents. As you approach the 50 million document limit, you may find that SharePoint indexing times increase. But if you are struggling with slow indexing, you will want to consider that larger documents take more computing resources. When the volume of documents to be indexed rises and the average file size goes up, you may be experiencing a performance bottleneck.

You may want certain features available for your users. Among the most-requested functions are deduplication of result sets, parametric searching/browsing, entity extraction and on-the-fly classification, and options for merging different types of content in the SharePoint environment. Web pages located in the cloud and third-party content are two types of content that can absorb scarce resources.

One of the major reasons for shifting from the ESS to a third-party system is a need to provide certain features to different types of users. For example, a SharePoint user needing information for customer support tasks wants a “view” of certain information. Third-party systems can provide administrative tools that make this type of collection-centric search a point-and-click checklist in the search administration system.

Change for its own sake is not a sure-fire recipe for success. A solid user experience or business reason is. The good news is that there are more than 300 vendors with enterprise search systems that to a greater or lesser degree support SharePoint. The bad news is that you have to select a system.

Switching Methodology

Each IT professional with Microsoft certification knows how to set up, configure, and maintain SharePoint and other “core” Microsoft server systems. Let’s look at a methodology for replacing SharePoint with ISYS Search Software’s ISYS:web. ISYS is one of a half-dozen vendors offering so-called “SharePoint Search” capabilities.
Here’s a run down of a procedure that minimizes pitfalls.

1. Set up a development server with SharePoint running. You don’t need to activate the search services. This can be on a computer running Windows Server 2003 or 2008. Microsoft recommends at a minimum a server with dual CPUs, each running at least 3 GHz, and 2 GB of memory. Also necessary for installation are Internet Information Services (IIS, along with its WWW, SMTP, and Common Files components), version 3.0 or greater of the .NET Framework, and ASP.NET 2.0. A more detailed look at these requirements can be found here.

2. Create a single machine with several folders containing documents and content representative of what you will be indexing.

3. Install ISYS:web 8 on the machine running SharePoint

4. Work through the configuration screens, noting the information required to add additional content repositories to index. An intuitive ISYS Utilities program will let you configure SharePoint indexes.

5. Launch the ISYS indexing component. Note the time indexing begins and ends. You will need these data in order to determine the index build time when you bring the system up for production.

6. Run test queries on the indexed content. If the results are not what you expect, make a return visit to the ISYS set up screens, verify your choices, delete the index, and reindex the content collection. Be sure to check that entities are appearing in the ISYS display.

7. Open the ISYS results template so you can familiarize yourself with the style sheet and the behind-display controls.

8. Once you are satisfied that the basics are working, verify that ISYS is using security flags from Active Directory.

Once you are satisfied, you can install ISYS on the production server and begin the processing of generating the master index. Additional image files for the ISYS installation are available here. These include screen shots illustrating how to set up the ISYS index.

Some Gotchas to Avoid

Most third-party search systems from Microsoft Certified Gold partners mesh smoothly with SharePoint. However, there are some challenges you will want to think about.

First, when documents change, the search system must recognize that change, copy or crawl the document, and make the changed document available to the indexing subsystem. The new index entries must be added to the main index. Some search systems use a separate index for new and changed entries, thus a single query is passed against two or more indexes. When a slow down in indexing occurs, you will need to check the resources available. Network latency can bog down the system. Inadequate random access memory and insufficient disc storage can choke the system with disc accesses.

Second, keep in mind that new documents must be indexed and changed documents have to be reindexed. In both processes, the main index must be updated. Setting the index update at too aggressive a level can slow down query processing. If you have adjusted the time and depth of your crawls, you may want to expand the hardware available to the system. Clustering can speed up search systems, but you will need to allocate additional time to configure and optimize the systems.

Third, additional text processing features such as deduplication, entity extraction, clustering, and generating suggestions or See Also hints for users suck computing resources. Under load, these indexing functions can slow down even well-resourced search systems. Implement only the text processing functions you need. Fancy extras can contribute to sluggish performance. Users will lose patience with a slow response to a query.

Finally, trim the graphical bells and whistles. The most recent version of SharePoint supports Microsoft’s rich media tools such as Silverlight. In an organization, users want answers. Some of the consumer-oriented features make a search system visually appealing, but when used to excess, eye candy can get in the way of a user’s getting the information required quickly.

To sum up, SharePoint ships with a usable search-and-retrieval system. When you want to break through the current document barrier or add features quickly, you will want to consider a third-party solution. Regardless of the system you select, set up a development server and run shake downs to make user the system will deliver the results the users need.

Jess Bratcher, for Beyond Search

I’ve been a part of every release of SharePoint technology since the start. Way back in the SPS 2001 (“Tahoe”) days, I was with Microsoft Consulting Services helping with field customers in the Tahoe early adopter program, and was part of the team that created architectural guidance for an optimal intranet deployment of SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and SharePoint Team Services 1.0.

I joined the SharePoint Product Management team officially in 2002, and became responsible for technical evangelism to developers and IT Pros. Over the five years that followed, I focused in on developer evangelism, interoperability issues, technical education, and a lot more. My final year at Microsoft was spend acting as a technical resource on Microsoft and competing technology to their enterprise sales teams.

I actually met the Nintex guys back in early 2002; the co-founders were still primarily in the services business, and they were attending a conference at which I was providing training. We became friends and colleagues and kept in touch. When Nintex decided to set up an American office earlier this year, they approached me and offered me more fun, more focus, and more money, and I’d still get to remain a part of the SharePoint community.

What is your role now?

I’m the Vice President of Product Technology, which essentially means I have a hand in everything from evangelism to marketing to sales to business planning to guiding short-term and long-term development and support tactics and strategies.

Tell us a bit about Nintex.

When I first met them, they were extremely clever and passionate SharePoint people, but there are several of those. Here’s the part that really impressed me…

While WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003 were great as a whole, we got a lot of grief (deservedly so) for not having a recycle bin and for not creating a new approval routing system for the then-new SQL Server store. I had, on several public occasions, told audiences how to use the eventing mechanism and a hidden document library to take care of the undelete problem, and that the eventing mechanism left room for clever workflow vendors to write something of their own. Weirdly enough, Nintex went out and built SmartLibrary, a product that did exactly those things (and a few others). Either they listened to me or we were simply in sync — either of those is a good thing.

Since then, they’ve set themselves up to build solutions FOR SharePoint technology and build them ON SharePoint technology. They’ve got short release cycles so they can adapt to new customer needs quickly, and they’re fully prepared to have to adapt/innovate/capitalize on changes that take place when Microsoft releases new versions.

Case in point: WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 provide a recycle bin and an audit trail, so Nintex decided to throw their resources into taking SmartLibrary’s simple approval up several notches to create Nintex Workflow 2007. It’s built on the same declarative workflow platform used by SharePoint Designer, but they provide a visual design environment and expose a great deal more of the feature set offered by the Windows Workflow Foundation. Plus the upgrade path is nice. They’ve thought this through.

So what is Nintex Reporting? Start with a single-sentence description, if you don’t mind.

Nintex Reporting gives you insight into the structure, content, usage, and performance of your SharePoint assets.

If I can now elaborate with more than a sentence, I’ll add that you can use it for adoption planning, usage monitoring, capacity planning, and a lot more.

There are over 75 reports in the box that cover user activity, list creation and usage, document popularity with breakdowns by file type and content type, site size, site collection size, content database saturation, and a lot more. Reports are executed on a schedule and archived. You can drill down to the individual details with one click.

Who would use it?

If you’re in charge of any corner of your SharePoint deployment, there’s something in it for you. It’s certainly optimized for IT pros operating SharePoint farms, but it’s actually quite useful to an individual site manager. The entire UI is built out of Web Parts and delivered by default as a custom site definition, but you can place key Web Parts that point to reports, scope them to a single site or collection, and embed them in any site. Would you like to see how much activity is taking place in different discussion lists? Who’s downloading which documents? How often they get updates vs. read? You can have that.

How is it different from the out-of-the-box capabilities present in SharePoint Server?

I’ll give you four good ones:

1) First off, it tells you a lot more than you’ll get in the box with MOSS or WSS.

2) Second, it’s very easy to use. You get interactive, Silverlight-based reports with drill-down, pop-over data visualization, and a lot more. You get role-based, easily customized dashboards that pull together sets of reports to suit specific user’s needs.

3) Third, the architecture is really, really nice. It takes a data warehouse-based approach. To keep the impact on your production environment low, we collect data out of your production servers and push facts into the warehouse. We execute reports against the warehouse on a schedule and cache the results. To boost response time, our UI reports from those cached results, and we only directly query the warehouse fact data when you need to do a drill-down. As a result, you get fast, fast access to, well, everything.

4) It’s extensible — very extensible. You can create your own data collectors, your own reports, your own dashboards, etc. You can even create SQL Server Analysis Services cubes against our warehouse and go nuts with your own queries using Excel Services, etc. Our SDK covers all of this.

That warehouse is what I regard as our secret sauce. We’ve released a product that provides SharePoint insight for everyone, but it’s just the first of many ways we can leverage that investment. Stay tuned!

Would you mind sharing a few screenshots?

Sure:

The collection of role-based dashboards available out of the box.

The role-based dashboard for a SharePoint implementation manager, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include unique users, popular sites, site activity, and document growth.

The role-based dashboard for an IT manager, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include file type distribution, document storage growth, content database growth, and team site sizes.

The role-based dashboard for a records manager, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include document type distribution, document growth, active authors, and document publication status.

The role-based dashboard for a system administrator, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include the most active users, document storage volume, and site creation statistics.

Report on total user activity, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on monthly growth of documents, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on list creators, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on the most active users of SharePoint Search, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on document content size per team site, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on farm-wide distribution of documents by file type, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on which users are creating the most content, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on monthly contributors to SharePoint sites across a farm, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on the most active users of a SharePoint farm, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Configuration screen for subscribing to snapshots of a report at predetermined times.

By Julia Hall, Director of SharePoint Products at Idera

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Idera provides management and administration tools for Microsoft Windows Servers. The most recent addition to its product portfolio is the Point admin toolset – a suite of 10 essential tools that make managing your SharePoint farms, sites and servers a breeze. Integrated into a single console, the tools automate a wide range of admin tasks including site monitoring, server monitoring, backup and recovery and security management.

Designed to reduce SharePoint admin work from days or hours, to mere minutes, the toolset is easy to use and can empower even the least experienced SharePoint admins to perform key admin tasks—all without in-depth knowledge of SharePoint internals.

A Quick Tour of Idera’s Point admin toolset

Delivered on a console called the Launchpad, the tools are grouped for easy identification and navigation into categories: Performance and Availability Management, Site and Server Management and Security. A quick tour of the tools follows.

Performance and Availability Management Tools

SharePoint has quickly become the most adopted enterprise content management solution; hosting companywide applications and data that are critical to daily operations. Monitoring its performance and storage usage and ensuring that data is properly backed up are essential to ensuring a healthy SharePoint environment.

Site Monitor Tool

Site Monitor continually monitors the performance of any SharePoint URL to identify performance bottlenecks and trends. You can see when sites are performing poorly, when sites are down and view performance over time.

Space Trends Tool

Storing documents in SharePoint is easy and convenient. However, this also means storage can grow out of control fast – really fast! Space Trends helps you track the growth of your sites and document libraries so you can analyze growth trends, perform capacity planning and ensure that you never run out of storage.

Backup Scheduler Tool

SharePoint stores data, much of it critical data that you can’t afford to lose! It’s essential that you make sure data is backed up consistently and regularly. With the Backup Scheduler Tool, you can rest assured that your data is safe in the event of accidental deletion, corruption or hardware failure. You can schedule full backups as often as you like and provide notification of success or failure via e-mail and the Windows event log.

Site Management Tools

Like all sophisticated systems, SharePoint does need some care and feeding every day. Admin tasks that appear simple enough to finish in a few minutes often morph into time-consuming jobs. The Site Management Tools in the Point admin toolset enable you to complete in minutes tasks such as daily site administration, recovering a document and managing alerts.

Quick Admin Tool

SharePoint has many things to administer and many places to administer them. Understanding and remembering them all is the challenge. What is the easiest path to find out how you can change quotas? How can I rename a site? How can I find all permissions settings for sites and users? Those are questions that you may often ask yourself but taking the time to search for the right admin command in the right place is the problem. The Quick Admin tool solves this issue by putting all of the commands at your fingertips. It has all of the admin links nicely organized into a single interface for all sites and site collections, the Central Administration and the SharePoint Service Provider (SSP).

Site Backup Tool

How hard could it be to recover a lost document in SharePoint? For those who have tried, you know the answer: it’s not as easy as you’d like. In fact, it can sometimes take days. What if you could recover a document in minutes? Perhaps even let your site owners and site collection admins back up their own sites? All this is simple with the Site Backup tool. With just a few clicks of the mouse, your users can back up and restore documents – relieving you of the burden!

Alert Manager Tool

Alerts help SharePoint users keep up with events that are important to them, such as document uploads, updates or deletes. While this is a very powerful feature, it also poses an administrative challenge because as the number of alerts grow so do their need to be managed. With Alert Manager, you can view, edit and delete all alerts across for all users.

Server Management Tools

Making sure the servers that support SharePoint, like Microsoft SQL Server, are well maintained is essential to ensuring a healthy SharePoint environment. If these servers aren’t maintained correctly, performance will degrade and system outages are, if not a certainty, a strong possibility.

Database Accelerator Tool

Many things can affect SharePoint performance. Often overlooked is the database engine, SQL Server, as SharePoint stores almost everything there –from built-in pages and configuration settings to document, as this information is subject to a lot of retrieval, movement and update. SQL Server’s indexes can become fragmented and performance can degrade. The Database Accelerator tool supplies a comprehensive view of the fragmentation level of all SharePoint databases indexes and the power to defragment without requiring the expertise of a database administrator!

Database Space Analyzer Tool

Managing database space utilization in SQL Server is often challenging for SharePoint users. Often, they can’t understand why SQL Server is running out of space when the stored SharePoint data is nowhere close to reaching the size allocated in SQL server. Only after much investigation do they discover that SQL Server‘s log files are the culprits, often taking up 10 times more space than the data files. The Database Analyzer tool enables you to analyze and understand database space utilization and detailed file settings across all of your SharePoint databases. Then, you can plan and allocate the right amount of storage to make sure there are no surprises.

Site Collection Configuration Tool

Understanding how your site collections are configured can mean the difference between allowing deleted documents to be moved to the recycle bin or be deleted forever, or accidentally disabling auditing for an important site. The Site Collection Configuration tool gathers information from site collections and provides a comparison of all settings, highlighting the differences. Configurations can also be saved for future comparison allowing you to identify unwanted changes!

Security Tools

While SharePoint has made information sharing more efficient and much easier, allowing users access to information has also created a greater responsibility for SharePoint administrators. They need to ensure the right information is available to the right users and only the right users. Understanding how permissions are applied to SharePoint objects and users is essential to ensuring a secure SharePoint environment.

Who Can Do What Tool

How many times do you get requests from SharePoint users asking why they don’t have access to this site or document or how did this user get access to this site? SharePoint offers different layers of security and it is very challenging to understand how group membership, roles, policies and permission levels affect user access. The Who Can Do What tool provides a powerful but simple solution that displays all objects a user has access to, and what grants the user access. Now, security and access control questions can be answered in minutes not hours.

For more information about Idera’s Point admin toolset, please go to www.idera.com.

Julia Hall is the Director of SharePoint Products for Idera. Julia has more than 15 years of experience building management solutions for Microsoft Windows, Microsft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint. Julia has a computer science degree, a B.S. in Economic Science and an MBA from Rice University.

This Article was authored by Laura Farrelly:

“Laura Farrelly is currently the Director of Marketing for NewsGator Technologies, Inc.  Laura has nearly 10 years of executive level marketing and product management experience at business-to-business software companies. Laura has a B.S. in Engineering from Michigan Technological University, a M.S. in Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.”

NewsGator Social Sites provides behind-the-firewall social computing and RSS capabilities that enable businesses to deliver “Facebook for the Enterprise”.  Social Sites integrates seamlessly with Microsoft SharePoint to provide employees with:

• Social Home/Start Pages – provides users with colleague activity feeds, enables network building, and surfaces relevant content.
• Social Profile Pages – enables expert/colleague location and validation, provides social network graphs, and displays activity streams.
• Communities – allows for easy discovery and creation of ad hoc groups, supports social bookmarking and content sharing, and offers rich discussion and document collaboration capabilities.
• Content Discovery – provides advanced RSS capabilities (feeds, subscriptions, and management), surfaces hot topics and content, and eases content discovery with tagging and tag clouds.

NewsGator Social Sites integrates seamlessly with SharePoint to provide enterprises with secure social computing capabilities that have been designed specifically for business purposes.  The following is a review of some of Social Sites most social features.

• 1) Social Network Graphs – these graphs provide a visual depiction of a person’s closest colleagues along with recommendations for new colleagues. The nice part about this feature is that Social Sites compiles this information automatically based on the actions people are taking within SharePoint. With this feature, people can quickly locate experts or find other people in the organization that are working on similar projects.
  
• 2) Communities – Social Sites enables people to create groups on the fly in order to collaborate around a special interest or project. Non-technical users can create groups with a few simple clicks. Groups can share documents and content and engage in discussions. Communities facilitate collaboration and help businesses improve productivity and innovation.
• 3) Profile Pages – these pages feature overviews of a person including the content they create in SharePoint, their favorite RSS subscriptions, the tags they use most frequently, their current status, areas of expertise, etc. Profiles make it easy for people to find subject matter experts to assist with problem solving or work projects.
  
• 4) Start Pages - Start pages provide a person with a personalized portal experience. Users can track their colleague’s portal activity including blog posts, document additions, discussion threads, etc. Relevant content is automatically surfaced for the user based on their portal activities. Users can track colleagues’ current status and even update their own status. Personalized tag clouds can be added to the start page such that the user has quick access to their most important content. Users can set up a personalized RSS reader with their favorite feeds. And the system even suggests new colleagues to a user based on people’s activity in the portal.
• 5) Community Discovery – Social Sites makes it easy to discover relevant groups and communities within SharePoint. Social Sites recommends communities based on colleagues who are already members, as well as similar tags, read content, subscriptions and activities. Social Sites also provides for easy discovery of groups via tags, search, and lists of recently created communities.
• 6) Social Bookmarks - This feature allows users to tag any URL or web content and automatically save it to a community, their profile, or other SharePoint locations.

“Newsgator has a terrific front end to SharePoint. Check it out if you’re considering SharePoint for SN/Collab.” Susan Scrupski, IT Insider, Twitter Update, June 11, 2008.

• “You perhaps are familiar with Newsgator as an RSS aggregator. Earlier this year we wrote about its social platform built on top of Microsoft SharePoint. Newsgator was showing its newest release of the software and we remain impressed with the approach. Many vendors are trying to deliver ‘Facebook for the Enterprise.’ Newsgator is one of the best.” Jonathan Yarmis, Fanning the Flames of Enterprise 2.0, June 13, 2008.
• Universal McCann Launches Intranet 2.0, Adopts Social Networking Platform, Joe Mandese, Media Post, Jun 10, 2008.
• Microsoft, Other Firms Take Aim at Enterprise 2.0 Market with New Tools, By Heather Havenstein, ComputerWorld, June 9, 2008.

Company Details:

Company Name: NewsGator
Company URL: www.NewsGator.com
Product URL: www.newsgator.com/Business/SocialSites
Product Video: http://www.newsgator.com/Business/SocialSites/Video/SocialSites_Viddler.aspx
Pricing: Pricing and licensing for Social Sites is based on a one-time, per-user license fee that scales based on number of users.  Yearly support is charged as a percentage of the license fee.