sharepoint health check

Service overview 

Challenge 

If your SharePoint environment grows like a seed, you want to make sure it does not grow out of control and performs as intended. What you need is a competent service to ensure that your SharePoint implementation is efficient and secure enough to maximize the productivity of its users and lower the burden on your IT department. 

Concerns and Possible Solutions

In our experience, enterprises face several common issues with their SharePoint environments. This is how ScienceSoft can help you find the right solution:

• Poor performance. With the increasing amount of content, SharePoint becomes sluggish, the system responds slower. Identifying the issues is a challenge. ScienceSoft analyzes your SharePoint environment to pinpoint the causes of trouble;
• Security issues. In the course of an in-depth expertise, ScienceSoft checks custom SharePoint applications for security vulnerabilities which often emerge because of the improper configuration of anonymous/ unauthorized access and permissions. ScienceSoft uses Microsoft best practices as well as their extensive SharePoint experience to address all possible issues;
• High support costs. By taking a proactive approach in solving the identified issues, you not only enhance productivity and avoid potential risks but also cut the costs of fixing problems by your system administrators;
• SharePoint is not used to its full potential. In close cooperation with your business and technical representatives, ScienceSoft integrates into your processes for a better understanding of how the SharePoint solution should be reconfigured to meet your corporate goals. Working together with you, ScienceSoft finds out which services could do better and which of the ones you don’t use could bring value. You will also be advised on possible integrated solutions – for example, how to bring the SharePoint environment with your CRM system together.

Approach 

ScienceSoft team averages more than 9 years of SharePoint experience and has successfully worked on implementations in such domains as oil and gas industry, banking and finance, retail and others. It brings in the whole of the past experience to identify the current as well as the potential issues in the SharePoint infrastructure regardless of your company’s size. 

ScienceSoft has developed a proven health check methodology to help customers make the most of their SharePoint investment. The methodology allows to assess your portal and identify the vulnerabilities that affect your solution’s security, stability and performance. It covers but is not limited to:

• End-user experience assessment and load-time analysis;
• Analysis of the custom application exceptions;
• Review of the custom application code;
• Check against compliance with the Microsoft recommended rules;
• Content assessment and analysis.

Deliverables 

You get a detailed report with ScienceSoft’s recommendations on the issues that are to be addressed for a better performance of your SharePoint environment. The document will precisely describe the findings as well as the practical solutions for both the short and long term. It will focus on every key aspect that may affect the SharePoint performance and security, including the custom application code, hardware configurations, content and more. ScienceSoft will fully exploit their expertise to predict the future behavior of your environment. Additionally, you can acquire ScienceSoft’s assistance in implementing the recommendations technically.

Case study

Challenge

The Customer, an international insurance company, had performance issues on the SharePoint 2010 production environment which contained 5 separate farms with approximately 120 servers and encompassed over 70,000 users. Among the issues to be analyzed there were: 

• Multiple authentication layers that caused system lags;
• High CPU/ resources utilization;
• Wrong SharePoint Search configuration;
• Large amounts of unstructured data;
• Unstable infrastructure.

Diagnosis 

ScienceSoft used their assessment methodology with regard to all aspects which could affect system performance and came up with particular findings:

• Excessive number of pages with a long (more than 10 sec) execution time on some of the farms;
• Excessive disk usage on some of the servers;
• Applications that generated errors;
• More than 1,000 pieces in the custom application code were noncompliant with the Microsoft Minimum Recommended Rules;
• Some pieces of JavaScript code were not optimized;
• The portal did not run correctly in IE7;
• Lists with an excessive number of fields (more than 200) and items (more than 40,000).

Results

The project was finished in 4 months. During the assessment, ScienceSoft team has revealed all critical issues and provided a report with 30 detailed recommendations for performance improvement. Based on the ScienceSoft’s recommendations the Customer solved the issues and improved the system performance and stability. 

Key elements of the methodology

End-user experience assessment and load-time analysis

ScienceSoft determines which client-side code pieces and network issues may impact the SharePoint performance. ScienceSoft collects and analyzes the IE Network, Fiddler and IE/ Chrome performance-profiling reports to pick out the slowest client-side functions.

Analysis of the custom application exceptions

To analyze the custom application exceptions, ScienceSoft

• Examines the SharePoint logs for a certain period of time;
• Acquires the list of all exceptions generated by the custom applications;
• Acquires the list of all custom applications, as well as the pieces of code, which generate exceptions.

Review of the custom application code

This assessment stage aims at identifying the pieces of code in the custom applications which cause performance issues in the SharePoint infrastructure. Only the application features that can affect system performance are subject to analysis. During this stage, ScienceSoft acquires detailed information on the existing issues and provides assumptions about a possible solution.

Some of the feature types that tend to affect system performance are:

• Event receivers;
• Delegate controls;
• Master Page functionality;
• HTTP modules/ HTTP handlers;
• Custom authentication provider.

Check against compliance with the Microsoft recommended rules

ScienceSoft analyzes if a custom application source code is compliant with the Microsoft recommended rules. The focus is on the most critical issues in the code, including potential security holes, application crashes and other logic and design errors. ScienceSoft team uses Visual Studio Code Analysis tool to review the code. 

Content assessment and analysis

ScienceSoft defines which data may affect system performance. The data is analyzed according to the performance and capacity limits of SharePoint Server. A PowerShell script is used to get the following information:

• Subsites count;
• Items count;
• Fields count;
• Resource throttling configuration.

Typically, large lists (with an excessive number of items) can cause a significant performance decrease. Microsoft recommends to provide a careful planning for the structuring and implementation of large document libraries to meet performance requirements. The more the content is structured, the easier it is to manage the growth of the lists.

Pricing

The price is determined upon a detailed discussion of your needs with ScienceSoft.

Please contact us to discuss problems with your SharePoint environment and get hot tips right away.

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