SharePoint is a robust platform from Microsoft for enterprise content management (ECM) and document automation.
Organizations can deploy this software to optimize workflows and processes and simplify complex document management. SharePoint enables swift and transparent collaboration, making it seamless to share information across departments. With Reveille’s agentless monitoring platform, enterprises can ensure SharePoint runs at optimal performance.
This guide explores how to improve SharePoint performance and the challenges to consider.
Table of Contents
- Understanding SharePoint Performance Challenges
- Strategies for Optimizing SharePoint Performance
- Monitoring Your Sharepoint Environment
Understanding SharePoint Performance Challenges
Optimizing performance in SharePoint is vital; however, there are many challenges to consider when using this ECM platform.
Here are these challenges and their impacts.
Slow Load Times
SharePoint sites, pages, and servers often experience delayed loading times when processing large files, especially if they are not optimized for performance.
Slow page load times can be detrimental to productivity and efficiency while also harming user adoption and experience. Businesses will find it challenging to complete simple tasks, eliminating the convenience of automated document management.
This is specifically true for enterprises handling high volumes of unstructured data, as this data type is typically more complex and will impact SharePoint’s overall performance.
If organizations don’t implement solutions like Reveille to achieve optimal performance, the outcomes could be costly – businesses risk losing documents, incorrectly categorizing information, duplicating files, and exhausting data storage.
Customization Concerns
Customizing SharePoint to specific business needs is cumbersome and challenging. Organizations often have to invest a lot of time and effort in tailoring SharePoint software to the documents they want to manage and how to automate these solutions. SharePoint is not an out-of-the-box document management system; businesses must customize this software to achieve the desired results.
Simple SharePoint customizations, such as branding, may be quick to implement. However, more complex customizations – configuring automation workflows and user access – can take weeks or months to develop. Creating custom workflows and code can significantly impact performance, as organizations face bottlenecks and inefficiencies in producing the desired document management environment.
Data Security and Compliance
Achieving optimal SharePoint performance requires organizations to overcome data security and compliance challenges. Managing high volumes of data and susceptible information demands a robust security infrastructure. With these standards in place, businesses can avoid costly data breaches that may jeopardize their reputation and client relationships.
For example, if a hospital fails to implement sound data security measures, this would expose the personal details of countless employees and patients.
Likewise, businesses must maintain data compliance regulations. Otherwise, organizations will experience negative SharePoint performance, as they will constantly have to recover from data breaches and exhaust their resources to avoid fines and penalties for compliance violations.
Access Control and Permissions
SharePoint provides a granular permission system for in-depth document control. While this benefits enterprises and gives them greater control over data access, managing this system could be more convenient. Organizations must specify permissions for different users, groups, and roles for documents and workflows. As a result, updating permission access is challenging and inefficient.
In addition, if administrators incorrectly assign permissions, they will have to implement various steps to correct this, and the changes will not be immediate. It takes SharePoint approximately 30 minutes to update permissions, which can add inefficiencies in document management processes.
Strategies for Optimizing SharePoint Performance
The good news is that these challenges can be overcome.
Here is how SharePoint administrators can ensure optimal site and server performance for their ECM environment.
Implement Proactive Monitoring
Reveille for SharePoint helps companies enhance performance through monitoring and optimizing server response times. Enterprises will gain valuable insights into over 40 key performance metrics, which give businesses the information they need to understand the cause of delayed load times and pinpoint strategic resource allocation to prevent these performance delays.
In addition, Reveille’s agentless monitoring tool reveals in-depth user activity so organizations can understand how various users navigate their ECM environments, potential security threats, and suspicious activity.
To optimize SharePoint’s online performance, Reveille tracks the following:
- Site operating performance
- User behavior
- User access
- Site admin performance
- Connectivity
- Database performance
Analyzing these analytics gives organizations complete visibility and control of their SharePoint environment.
Isolate User and Database Traffic
SharePoint can quickly exhaust SQL, even if organizations connect multiple servers to high-speed bandwidth. Each request for a SharePoint page equates to numerous calls to the database, not including search indexing, document classification, and many other operations in SharePoint online.
This obstacle can prevent businesses from maximizing their efficiency and productivity using SharePoint, making simple commands challenging to process. As a result, developers may also have to spend time and effort maintaining optimal performance.
Businesses must separate user and database traffic via virtual LANs or physical networks. This often requires a minimum of two separate network interface cards in each front-end Web server. Developers must configure static routes to ensure traffic is routed to the correct interface. With separate user and database traffic, enterprises have a better chance to optimize SharePoint performance, lightening the load on SQL.
Invest in User Training
Often overlooked in optimizing SharePoint online performance, user training is critical. Enterprises must educate their teams on maintaining SharePoint servers and the processes and tools required to achieve this. Understanding SharePoint’s built-in feature enables users to ensure system efficiency and know how to respond and solve bottlenecks.
Customizing these programs to unique organizational needs is imperative to ensure teams have the specific information they need to help businesses achieve their goals. For example, companies implementing Reveille’s ECM integration must provide their team with bespoke training on deploying Reveille’s proactive monitoring tools. As an organization’s ECM infrastructure advances, so must its training programs to ensure teams are well-equipped.
Manage Page Customizations
Customizing SharePoint takes a long time, and when organizations use SharePoint Designer, the database has to retrieve the custom code on every request. While this can work for smaller ECM environments, those with hundreds or thousands of pages will experience performance issues.
Enhancing SharePoint performance requires enterprises to find a solution to manage how and when page customizations occur.
Systems administrators must implement policies to ensure pages are only customized when necessary. Farm and site collection administrators can restrict user access to SharePoint Designer or reset changes to their original form to mitigate performance issues from customizations that are too frequent.
Leverage Caching Functionalities
Most of the content users request is cached in memory. This includes Web parts, lists, queries, and documents. Using SharePoint Object Cache, system administrators can configure customized cache profiles to fulfill various user requirements. For instance, anonymous users can be assigned varying cache policies from authenticated users, disallowing them to get an in-depth view of content changes compared to established content editors.
Organizations can also configure cache profiles by page type. As a result, layout and publishing pages will behave differently, and enterprises can specify caching based on the client and server. The SharePoint Object Cache significantly improves the execution time for resource-intensive elements, like the Content Query Web Part.
Ultimately, this maintains optimal SharePoint online performance and ensures swift web application execution.
Configure Robust Automation
Organizations must automate as many processes and workflows as possible to streamline operations and maintain efficiency.
Without automation, businesses will have to rely on manual processes, which will expose them to costly errors and negatively impact performance.
For example, if multiple users need to sign a document, they must send individual requests to the database to retrieve documents. However, automating this workflow eliminates the back-and-forth communication between users and the database and requires less manual effort.
With Reveille’s proactive monitoring for SharePoint, organizations can automate system maintenance. Reveille will monitor the ECM environment 24/7, ensuring all servers operate optimally; our software deploys automated remediation techniques to solve performance issues before they evolve.
These include:
- Disabling user access
- Starting an ECM process or application to eliminate bottlenecks
- Relaunching an ECM web application
- Restarting a failed ECM service
Helping enterprises stay ahead of system performance, Reveille delivers automated reports highlighting what problem occurred and which remediation tactic was deployed to solve it.
Prioritize Continuous Improvement
Maintaining SharePoint site performance requires continuous improvement. Businesses must rely on tools like Reveille to gain complete visibility and control of their SharePoint environment, understand what aspects need improvement, and learn how to achieve this.
As businesses scale, their document management infrastructures become more complex and require new strategies and processes to maintain efficiency and data security.
Enterprises must audit their SharePoint framework at regular intervals. Analyzing user activity, experience, and adoption is essential to ensuring optimal performance.
Monitoring Your Sharepoint Environment
SharePoint allows companies to optimize how they manage, share, and store documents. However, such a robust system requires constant maintenance to maintain performance. SharePoint performance poses many challenges, including slow load times, customization concerns, data security and compliance, and access control.
Fortunately, there are many ways organizations can overcome these obstacles. They must invest in team training, implement proactive monitoring, manage page customizations, leverage caching, and prioritize continuous improvement.
With Reveille, enterprises can gain complete visibility into their SharePoint performance and rely on advanced analytics and automation to ensure their system runs smoothly.
Need agentless monitoring for SharePoint? Get Reveille’s demo today.
