Axceler ControlPoint Success Story

The Newark Group

The Business Challenge

Tom Ritter is the IT Director of a small team with a large charter: supporting the IT needs of a company with dozens of facilities throughout North America and Europe that comprise its 100% recycled paperboard and paperboard products business. Part of Ritter’s charter is managing the SharePoint environment used by The Newark Group’s knowledge workers to "run the business."

"We've been using SharePoint for a number of years, and the implementation has been successful," said Ritter, "But, with a small IT staff, we found ourselves struggling on the administrative side." One example of the problems he was facing was the lack of a global view of a person’s access to the system.

"Basically, we found ourselves hunting and pecking to access sites and sub-sites to find the information we needed. We needed an easy way to determine what an employee had access to – and not just when they were removed from the Active Directory when they left the company. If you want to know the main reason we started looking for an administration tool, that’s it. Period."

The Axceler Solution

The Newark Group chose Axceler ControlPoint as its SharePoint administration solution because "it does everything we want it to do and more," Ritter said. "And a critical factor for us is that ControlPoint is web-based. At The Newark Group, everything we do is via the web. I have to be able to get to ControlPoint from wherever I'm at. The other solutions we looked at were either in-house and required a client install, or, on closer look, were just not as strong as Axceler is when it comes to a web-based application."

Taking Advantage of ControlPoint

"One of the first things we anticipate using Axceler ControlPoint for is taking a global snapshot and determining whether everyone is seeing the things they’re allowed to. Seeing user permissions across the farm is a big deal for us," said Ritter, "Because we have no way of doing that now." Moving forward, Ritter will also be using Axceler ControlPoint to set up new people with SharePoint.

"I also like the idea of using ControlPoint to move sites from development to production," Ritter added. "We can do it now, but it's a huge pain. In this area, ControlPoint will mean real pain relief.” The Newark Group will also be using ControlPoint to perform standard maintenance that to date has been cumbersome and time-consuming. "ControlPoint will help us use our time more effectively.”

The Results

While keeping tabs on employee access was the main reason that The Newark Group looked to a SharePoint administrative solution, there were a number of other areas that, when it came to choosing Axceler, stood out for Tom Ritter.

"Axceler ControlPoint's being web-based was essential for us, but overall, we were impressed with the ease of use, the easy access to the functionality. You jump right in and get an immediate feel for what you can accomplish. For The Newark Group, Axceler ControlPoint is our one stop shop for viewing everything that's part of our SharePoint farm. I look to Axceler ControlPoint to help us cut down an hour of hunting and pecking to just a few seconds to find the answers we’re looking for. In a small IT shop like ours, that kind of time savings is huge."