Axceler ControlPoint Success Story
Tech Data
The Business Challenge
With annual revenues well over $20 billion, Tech Data is the world's largest distributor of hardware and software products. Its 125,000 customers, in over 100 countries, cut across the technology reseller spectrum, and include VARs, corporate resellers, ASPs, ISPs, systems integrators, government resellers, exporters, retailers, e-tailers, and catalogers. It's easily to understand that project management and workflow process management are critical to Tech Data – and they're the two main uses to which the company puts SharePoint.
Tech Data's SharePoint environment is composed of four farms – used for a lab, development environment, pilot environment, and production – which are used by thousands of employees.
As enterprise architect for front office systems, Erik Toth is charged with the strategy, architecture, and deployment how-to for SharePoint at Tech Data.
"We've gotten tremendous productivity out of SharePoint," Toth said. "For our end-users, it's a dream. But for those of us on the administration side of SharePoint, things aren't always so dreamy." The challenges that Toth faced included being able to evaluate what was going on at multiple levels – farm, site collection, and site. Task scheduling and automation were other areas that Toth found difficult to manage. "I was having a hard time finding answers to questions like 'how many sites do I have?', 'what kind of traffic are they experiencing?', 'what's the growth in consumption of disk space?'"
The Axceler Solution
After reviewing some Open Source tools, which Toth found "geeky, but not especially useful," as well as a competitive solution, he chose Axceler’s ControlPoint because it would enable him to look at each farm as a whole and as individual site collections. "Control Point," Toth says, "Offered the most holistic view."
Taking Advantage of ControlPoint
Toth and the three SharePoint administrators he works with use ControlPoint for its administrative view, for reporting, and for job scheduling – "being able to design a task and automate it with ControlPoint has been real benefit to us," Toth reported. They also like ControlPoint’s ability to let them take a subsite and move it to its own site collection without have to redo it. Reporting is another feature Tech Data takes advantage of. "I like being able to have reports e-mailed to me, or pushed out to a SharePoint list."
The Results
"Using ControlPoint is saving us time, and making life much easier for us," Toth says. "From a management perspective, it's filling in some crucial gaps. Just the ability to duplicate user rights saves us tremendous time when compared to manual efforts. Another big time-saver for us is having the ability to turn a feature on across the environment, without having to touch every site. This is huge."
ControlPoint's automation capabilities are an important ingredient of the time-savings that Tech Data is experiencing with the product. "With ControlPoint, there's an awful lot that I can automate. One place where it really helps us out is with Human Resources – a group that's one of the biggest users of SharePoint at Tech Data. They're often looking for information such as what information a separated employee had access to. With ControlPoint, we're set up to automatically provide that type of data."
Toth anticipates even greater efficiency gains with ControlPoint. "Because ControlPoint is so easy to use, we'll be able to roll it out to site owners so that they can do their own reporting, as well as handle their own permissions. This will be a win-win situation. The site owners will feel empowered, and our IT team will be freed up to work on more strategic projects." Tech Data will also be using ControlPoint for storage quota management.
"ControlPoint can handle SharePoint environments of all shapes and sizes, as well as a multi-farm environment like mine," Toth said. "Most SharePoint tools just can't do this as well. Whatever your environment, ControlPoint is the solution to getting your arms around it."