SharePoint Latency Issues are Criminal- Real Time Information Access is Vital

Microsoft (News - Alert) SharePoint is close to industry standard for all kinds of business- and enterprise-level interactions. File management, business intelligence, collaborative activities, and search are all part of the SharePoint package—so when the web application is running slowly, it is felt at every level of the company. Latency issues affect customers, as well, so it’s vital to be proactive in the search for latency problems. Ideally, customers and most employees would never even sense the issues by the time they were solved, but that isn’t always the case.

Firms have come to rely more and more on the reliability and consistency of their mobility solutions. As a result, when working with enterprise mobility technology, a single hiccup in service can stymie an entire product line:

• Enterprise Communications (News - Alert) & Messaging: A poorly timed gap in communication could spell doom for a company, if the wrong order is made or a client is left hanging. It’s vital to maintain services at all times to pre-empt a disaster spawned from lack of communication.

• Mobile Collaboration: Distributed team force is commonplace in the modern business, as asynchronous project technology is growing more advanced. However, the absence of one or more team members—specifically team leaders—can waste large amounts of time, or worse, risk outright project failure.

• Database Errors: As above, users of enterprise mobile tech may need access to files or server-side data at any time. An unreliable database is simply too large of a risk for most large-scale agencies—they value stability over anything else.

Latency, in effect, represents the above catastrophes on a smaller scale. Rather than a complete collapse of the system, access is bottlenecked by a certain underperforming component of the network. In order to fix these problems, it’s important to understand what causes latency:

• Bandwidth (News - Alert): The first cause of latency is low bandwidth for your network. Your connection itself is slow, or your routers and firewalls are unable to handle all of your internet traffic.

• Unnecessary components: Some SharePoint features may be more useful to your business than others. Each component takes time and processor power to initialize, maintain and update. Disable widgets that you don’t or rarely use and you may see a surge in performance.

• Volume: Large amounts of users or clicks all at once can slow the responsiveness of SharePoint, since it must meet the increased demand with the same memory as always.

These problems are only the tip of the iceberg, as any user familiar with SharePoint will tell you. Luckily, industry experts like GSX have developed and distributed powerful solutions, starting with their innovative approach to monitoring:

User-Centered Monitoring GSX was built to be agent-less. Behaving as a silent Robot User, GSX monitors user-side systems and interactions to give potent feedback, more meaningful than just server uptime. It can set up on any computer or virtual machine to operate and analyze in real time. 

QoS assessment

By assessing the QoS (Quality of Service) of the Messaging and Collaboration environment you identify areas for improved performance, availability, reliability, and efficiency from an end user perspective.

Preventive Problem Solving

By monitoring the active domains of SharePoint infrastructure, GSX can alert agencies to problems before any serious issues occur. Most problems are intercepted before any real damage, keeping mean time to repair low and preventing administrators from having to fight fires.

Simple, Effortless Installation

GSX has absolutely zero server footprints. All monitoring occurs in the enterprise network, alongside business users. Not only does this method bypass the hassle of approving software installation on central servers, but the user-side monitoring also allows GSX to predict and prevent risks to the most vulnerable parts of mobile services. Thanks to our seamless integration with BlackBerry (News - Alert), IBM, Microsoft services, and existing application performance monitoring platforms, implementing GSX is always as smooth and simple as humanly possible. We can start protecting your agency today, not next month.

About the Author: Jean-Francois Piot, is responsible for articulating the vision of GSX product range and translating these into detailed specifications. His experience in IT processes and Service Management projects comes from previous business development positions at IBM (News - Alert) and Beijaflore (IT Service Provider). He holds a master degree from the Grenoble Graduate School of Business. In his spare time, he loves assembling and dissembling his old American Trans Am.