Here are 5 of the most common SharePoint management headaches and what you can do to put an end to them forever.

1. SharePoint Management and Updates 

Patching SharePoint may appear simple at first glance, but once you begin to understand that SharePoint updates come in variety of forms, the process begins to take on some complexity.  When do you install Public Updates?  Should you install Cumulative Updates or Service Packs?  Is there an order or priority for installing the updates?  What about patching the Windows Server and SQL Server?  And, if your organization has a multi-server farm, you’ll have to do all this on each server while minimizing downtime on your farm.

2. SharePoint Management and Your Server Topology

When it comes to improving the speed of your business processes and reducing (or even eliminating) manual content management, a customized SharePoint solution can be your best friend. However, maintaining SharePoint solutions across your servers can be downright frustrating. IT departments have to plan for different tiered server topologies and how business priorities fit into server roles. Managing this process increases in complexity the more customized your SharePoint architecture becomes.

3. Managing the SharePoint Storage Environment

Since SharePoint relies on SQL Server for content storage, poor performance and user dissatisfaction can often be caused by what’s happening at the storage level. Without a deep understanding of how SharePoint is structured, its functional limitations and boundaries, many IT departments can spend costly time troubleshooting their networking infrastructure or some portion of their existing SharePoint configuration without realizing it could be a problem with the data storage system or information architecture.  Without watchful eyes monitoring the health of the SQL environment and the size of the most popular sites and libraries, the potential amount of data stored on an underpowered SQL database can induce a major SharePoint headache.

4. Managing the SharePoint Service Accounts and Administrative Privileges

Managing and deploying service accounts is a tedious but necessary step in enterprise workflow and security. Deciding which users get administrative and design access and which users operate under what level of security can make or break your data safety protocols. Though SharePoint puts an emphasis on data security and distributed administration, how you keep your assets safe while expecting to scale up and down as needed can cause gaps in account policies. Between user error, third party add-ins, SharePoint updates, there is a constant need to monitor how the technical components of SharePoint challenge and complement your organizational culture.

5. SharePoint Management for Leveraging Back-End Analytics

Monitoring the health of a deployed SharePoint solution begins with monitoring SharePoint usage. SharePoint provides analytics on users, storage, operational health and web page popularity. Structuring these insights in a way that answers operations related questions can be challenging. The challenge compounds when you realize that you may need more detailed insights and need to search for a third-party analytics solution or add-in.

The Cure to Your SharePoint Management Headaches

With SharePoint Solution support from General Networks, you can focus on using and expanding SharePoint to meet your business goals. SharePoint Solution support works with your IT department to:

• Monitor the overall health of your SharePoint server environment via health alerts, outstanding SharePoint updates, usage and storage metrics
• Quickly resolve SharePoint server issues and assess underlying problems that have caused repeated issues and outages
• Provide monthly KPI reporting of metrics, issues and problems
• Support your organization through routine upgrades and administrative updates
• Provide support and answers to escalated user inquiries

Instead of trying to figure out how to make SharePoint work, you can spend your resources enabling SharePoint to work for you.

Our SharePoint Solution support can elevate SharePoint to a finely tuned and key business asset. Contact us to transform your SharePoint experience.