Axceler ControlPoint Success Story
Lender Processing Services
The Business Challenge
Lender Processing Services (LPS) provides mortgage processing services, settlement services, mortgage performance analytics and default solutions to the nation's largest banks and other mortgage lenders. The company prides – and differentiates – itself on the technology-based solutions that they provide to their clients. Part of their technology offering is a SharePoint customer collaboration site, one of three production farms maintained by LPS. Another of those farms is dedicated to collaboration among LPS's 8,500 employees; the third is the interface to the company's website.
The task of managing these farms falls to John Lokietek, Web Systems Administrator, whose team is responsible for administering the SharePoint infrastructure, rolling out applications, and, in Lokietek's words "helping to manage whatever pieces are needed" to ensure that things operate smoothly for customers and employees alike.
The challenges inherent in administering multiple farms is heightened by the fact that LPS was spun out of Fidelity National Information Services in 2008, and is working to create a cohesive whole out of an organization that was so recently part of a far larger entity.
"Getting our arms around our full SharePoint environment has been an interesting challenge," Lokietek reported. "While in some sense, we're still in our infancy with respect to using SharePoint, our employees and customers are increasingly reliant on it." Among the specific challenges Lokietek and his team faced were storage management, security, and identifying groups with one-off SharePoint implementations, some still using SharePoint 2003.
The Axceler Solution
After evaluating several SharePoint administrative solutions, Lender Processing Services selected Axceler's ControlPoint for its web-based architecture, enabling the SharePoint admin team to work remotely, if needed; for its reporting capabilities; for the built in security features that easily enable varied permissions; and for its ability to manage multiple site collections.
Moving Forward –
Taking Advantage of ControlPoint
"SharePoint is not the only application set we manage. We're also responsible for a number of .net apps," Lokietek said. "So we need to be as efficient as possible in everything we do. With ControlPoint, we're able to get a quick feel for what's going on in all of our farms." ControlPoint's reporting capability has proven especially useful. "The reporting piece I find just amazing, especially when it comes to handling information requests from site owners and management. With ControlPoint, I just take a link and put it on a site collection and someone can see a report related to that collection. With just one or two links – boom, boom – they can see what they need to see."
Remote access has also proven important to Lokietek's team. "Since we can so quickly get to ControlPoint wherever we have an Internet connection, it's very easy for us to check in and resolve issues in off-hours when something comes up."
Results
"ControlPoint doesn't fool around,"Lokietek said. "The interface is really good for managing multiple site collections, for pushing new user permissions and policies, and for enabling new features. The product helps us out enormously."
One area where ControlPoint has been useful has been in storage management. "Over a company our size – especially one that's so data-driven – storage is a major issue," Lokietek said. "With ControlPoint we have a better understanding of storage requirements, and are able to proactively do cleanup."
"ControlPoint is also helping us with our governance," he added. "With the type of information we handle, it's very important to be able to limit what those in certain functions and roles can and cannot see and do, and this is all laid out in our management and governance policies. With ControlPoint, we can manage permissions and privileges, and demonstrate it at audit time."
With all of the different applications that Lokietek and his team are responsible for, ControlPoint's being a web-based application is a definite plus. "With ControlPoint we don't need to worry about managing and maintaining another app."
"Overall, we find ControlPoint to be a very impressive product," Lokietek said. "It's robust, flexible, and it's web-based, built on top of SharePoint. You have all the flexibility of SharePoint plus the robustness of the functionality ControlPoint provides. We've been very happy with our decision to use ControlPoint for SharePoint administration."