SharePoint Health Check Service

Overview

Challenge

Our Health Check Service can help you reduce critical incidents before they occur. We review your SharePoint farm to determine if the reliability, security, and performance your organization needs are being provided. At the end of the audit we will deliver comprehensive documentation that shows exactly what we’ve found, and what to do about it.

Five Common SharePoint Implementation Mistakes We Look For

1. Incorrect application of the of the SharePoint Service Accounts required by SharePoint
2. All SharePoint installation drives kept on Drive C, which quickly runs out of space and prevents SharePoint from running normally
3. Assuming that a single server farm is adequate, which negatively impacts end user experience
4. Using the SharePoint Farm Configuration Wizard, which makes many inefficient decisions and may take up considerable server resources
5. Keeping default SharePoint database settings, which can affect overall farm performance

Concerns

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

• Poor performance.
• Security issues.
• High support costs.
• SharePoint is not used to its full potential.

Methodology

APTILabs has developed a proven health check methodology 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

Key elements of the methodology

End-user experience assessment and load-time analysis

APTILabs determines which client-side code pieces and network issues may impact the SharePoint performance. APTILabs 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, APTILabs

• 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, APTILabs 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

APTILabs 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. APTILabs team uses Visual Studio Code Analysis tool to review the code.

Content assessment and analysis

APTILabs 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 plan 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.

Deliverables

You get a detailed report with APTILabs 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. APTILabs will fully exploit their expertise to predict the future behavior of your environment. Additionally, you can acquire APTILabs assistance in implementing the recommendations technically.