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.